Someone asked a simple question this week: if Docker already runs containers and isolates your services, why does everyone jump straight to Proxmox? It's a fair question. It's also the kind of question that only gets asked before you've hit the specific wall that Proxmox exists to solve.

TrueNAS 26 BETA1 is out and it ships with a new versioning model you need to understand before you upgrade. iXsystems released 26-BETA1 on April 7 with over 700 changes. The fish names are gone. The new annual cadence means releases go 26.0, 26.1, 26.2 instead of a new animal every six months. LXC containers are fully supported, hybrid flash pools land with OpenZFS 2.4, and false-positive SMART alerts drop by about 50%. The catch: upgrading from 25.10 to 26-BETA1 isn't available in the UI until 25.10.3 ships. Manual bundle only for now. Worth testing on a spare box. Not worth touching your production NAS yet.

A Spanish court order aimed at football piracy accidentally took down Docker Hub for the whole country. On April 12, a Cloudflare block targeting streaming piracy caught Docker's registry in the crossfire. Spanish developers couldn't run docker pull for hours. The HN thread hit 1,144 points. The failure mode is the interesting part: one legal order, aimed at an entirely unrelated target, broke a core piece of infrastructure for an entire country. Local registry mirrors exist for exactly this reason.

Borg UI shipped v2.0, celebrated 1,000 GitHub stars, and immediately put features behind a paywall. The announcement post and the backlash post both hit r/selfhosted in the same week, together. Borg UI is a Docker-based web front end for BorgBackup. The v2.0 release added mobile UI, RBAC, and Hetzner Storage Box support and locked some previously free features behind a Pro tier. The fork conversation has already started.

We've watched this question come up in the homelab community more times than someone can count.

The honest answer is that Docker solves a specific problem well: running Linux containers on a Linux host. That covers most of what a homelab needs. Jellyfin, Vaultwarden, Immich, Nextcloud all fine in Docker Compose. If that's all you're doing, Docker is the right call and Proxmox is overhead you don't need.

The trouble starts the moment you want something Docker wasn't built for.

Running OPNsense as your router? That's a VM. Running a Windows instance to test something? VM. Running a different Linux distro than your host without risking a kernel mismatch? VM. Most homelab users in say they prefer VMs over containers. Proxmox gives you both, with a web UI that doesn't require touching the CLI to spin up or snapshot either.

The more you think about backup strategies, the more Proxmox’s incremental snapshot model stands out. It offers hourly snapshots that roll up into daily and monthly retention, all while keeping storage growth minimal; often just a few dozen gigabytes. That level of efficiency and structure is something Docker volumes and bind mounts don’t replicate nearly as cleanly.

The real reason Proxmox keeps getting recommended isn't that Docker is bad. It's that Proxmox is the thing you'll want once you hit the wall Docker can't cross. Starting there means you never have to migrate.

0xN1nja posted their homelab this week under the headline "started with a raspberry pi, now I run an entire AWS region at home." The post hit 4,100 upvotes. The actual hardware is a rack of old Core 2 Duo machines and a Compaq laptop serving as a backup server. Five-day average CPU load: 0.8%. Services running: Pi-hole, Unraid on NAS, Immich for one photo, Plex that nobody uses. Everything behind Tailscale, nothing exposed to the internet. The author documented the full setup at 0xn1nja.dev/homelab. It's a useful reminder that the bar for a functional homelab is lower than most builds suggest and that two-decade-old hardware still has a job to do.

The Proxmox question is really an architecture question. Docker is a tool. Proxmox is an environment. Most setups eventually need both.

Until next week go check if your backups actually restore.