Why do you say that? I’m interested in your opinion because I disagree. To be clear, I think proxmox is great, I just don’t feel it’s for the beginner.

My take on proxmox is that it’s great if you have actual server grade hardware that can handle multiple VMs and/or you want to do clustering. Neither of which I feel, a beginner would be attempting. I don’t even consider it for myself as I run on two SFFs PCs and I would see no benefit setting up proxmox > OMV instead of just installing OMV directly on them. Now if at some point I add more SFF PCS and want to cluster them or alternatively decide that I want to get rid of having multiple SFF PCs and run one singular, more powerful server, then I would see a benefit from proxmox… but not as it stands.

My take on the various options are this:

Tipi, Umbrel, CasaOS, YunoHost - Meant for average users that don’t want to spend any time on setup. Very easy to use, but also extremely limited walled gardens.

UnRaid - Much less limited then the above, but does force use of their UI often and in many cases is less efficient and frustrating if not downright incapable of accomplishing certain things. Meant for beginners that rely on UI.

OpenMediaVault - Basically Debian with an webadmin panel and the most common server services ready to install pre-configured with the most common + secure settings. So for beginners they can use the UI to setup shares and schedule jobs and containers and anything else really, but if they want to learn how to do things in the terminal then it doesn’t get in the way; I like that it gives you the freedom to do anything you want with it.

TrueNAS Scale - Great option if scaling out with additional hardware and your main concern is data storage. But I feel that unless you’re a member of datahoarder and have larger drive pools, this isn’t the best choice either. It does sometimes lock you into the GUI too, at least when I tried it earlier in their releases. Maybe that has changed now, but they wanted to force the UI with a lot of docker container setup which I found annoying.

So given this, I recommend OpenMediaVault to most selfhosters, beginners and more advanced users alike, as it gives the most freedom aside from configuring everything yourself on something like Ubuntu Server/openSuse/Debian/(pick your favorite flavor). I think Proxmox is great for the applications I mentioned initially (VMs on performant hardware, or clustering of multiple machines), but I just don’t see any benefit of it for a beginner nor if you are only going to have one or two lower powered machine like SBCs or SFF PCs.

But like I said, I’m interested in your opinion on why you would recommend it to a beginner. Or how you feel about my takes on these options.