Mikrotik is a great budget friendly option too. It’s pretty simple to do a standard home setup in RouterOS

And most of the problems actually have solutions with FOSS vs proprietary.

I had to spend months moving our IBM3270 automations to a new product because the company we had a license with apparently went under (they wouldn’t respond to requests for a new license when we needed to do a server upgrade.

It took so long because their proprietary BASIC like language had basically no documentation, and the scripts had been written like 12 years before. At least I moved us to an open source solution, which didn’t have the best documentation, but I could just look through the source to get the answers I needed (and had to program in some missing functionality).

I’m still sad that I wasn’t allowed to contribute to the project due to our government contracts. At least I could contribute to the python wrapper I found for it to make it Python 3 compatible.

One of these days I’ll get around to figuring out why Proxmox won’t start up unless I hit enter on the splash page.

It could totally be a hardware issue. I’ve seen something similar happen because the temperature cycles caused the RAM to wiggle out of the slot a bit, but it wasn’t far enough to cause issues until the stick heated up and got pushed a little further out.

I don’t think it’s likely to be a hardware issue unless it’s a faulty drive, but I can’t rule out other components until I can see some errors.

I feel like it’s unlikely to be a hardware issue unless the drive Proxmox is on is dying. SMART is fine, but it’s on an SSD that’s nearly 15 years old, so it very well might be the cause. I need to migrate it to one of my nvme disks eventually.

But, I can boot into the Windows physical disk just fine (instead of booting into Proxmox and running it as a VM). Same with a live ISO on USB.

The fact that it’s perfectly stable after I do get it to boot is why I’m chasing down a software issue first. I also don’t want to think about the cost of having to replace hardware yet. But I’m definitely not ruling it out completely.

I’m going to take the advice of another commenter and turn off quiet in grub so I can get a better look at what’s actually going on under the hood.

That’s exactly what I was looking for, thank you!

I made so many changes following different guides on GPU passthrough on an LXC with a virtual display (never worked) that I’m tempted to rebuild Proxmox from scratch.