Comprehensive comparison of Proxmox vs. NixOS

[afparsons]

Nice project! After fiddling with Unraid, I'm exploring other options [reddit post], and I'm happy to have found the PMS wiki.

I'm vaguely familiar with Proxmox and NixOS, but I've never thought of them as fulfilling similar roles as the host OS on a home server.

In the PMS wiki, you briefly touch upon why you have moved from Proxmox to Nixos:

• https://perfectmediaserver.com/01-overview/alexs-example-builds/#__tabbed_1_1
• https://perfectmediaserver.com/01-overview/faq/#should-i-run-pms-on-the-host-directly-or-as-a-vm
• https://perfectmediaserver.com/05-advanced/passthrough-igpu-gvtg/
• https://perfectmediaserver.com/02-tech-stack/proxmox/#do-i-need-proxmox

However, because the PMS wiki currently presents both as viable host OSes, it's a little hard to understand your rationale for choosing one over the other. With your latest adoption of NixOS, the wiki reads as quite unfinished and stuck in a transition state (totally understandable! Not a criticism!).

I'd imagine you are still experimenting and have not yet formed final conclusions. Nonetheless, I think a comprehensive comparison of Proxmox and NixOS would be extremely helpful.

Specifically, I would like to see:

• Your negative motivations for adopting NixOS (pain points in Proxmox)
• Your positive motivations for adopting NixOS (the benefits it provides)
• Tradeoffs of using Proxmox instead of NixOS (not declarative, etc.)
• Tradeoffs of using NixOS instead of Proxmox (hypervisor management, disk management, GUI, etc.)
• How to achieve most/everything Proxmox does, but using NixOS
• How to achieve some things that NixOS does, but using Proxmox (although this is perhaps impossible)

Thanks for documenting your hobby project!