Anyone else just sick of trying to follow guides that cover 95% of the process, or maybe slightly miss a step and then spend hours troubleshooting setups just to get it to work?
I think I just have too much going in my “lab” the point that when something breaks (and my wife and/or kids complain) it’s more of a hassle to try and remember how to fix or troubleshoot stuff. I lightly document myself cuz I feel like I can remember well enough. But then it’s a style to find the time to fix, or stuff is tested and 80%completed but never fully used because life is busy and I don’t have loads of free time to pour into this stuff anymore. I hate giving all that data to big tech, but I also hate trying to manage 15 different containers or VMs, or other services. Some stuff is fine/easy or requires little effort, but others just don’t seem worth it.
I miss GUIs with stuff where I could fumble through settings to fix it as is easier for me to look through all that vs read a bunch of commands.
Idk, do you get lab burnout? Maybe cuz I do IT for work too it just feels like it’s never ending…
Sounds like you haven’t taken the time to properly design your environment.
Lots of home gamers just throw stuff together and just “hack things till they work”.
You need to step back and organize your shit. Develop a pattern, automate things, use source control, etc. Don’t just file follow the weirdly -opinionated setup instructions. Make it fit your standard.
Also on top of that, find time to keep it up to date. If leave it rot things will get harder to maintain.
I sit down once a week and go over all the updates needed, both the docker hosts and all the images they run.
I deliberately have not used docker at home to avoid complications. Almost every program is in a debian/apt repo, and I only install frontends that run on LAMP. I think I only have 2 or 3 apps that require manual maintenance (apart from running “apt upgrade”). NextCloud is 90% of the butthurt.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Git Popular version control system, primarily for code RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer SSO Single Sign-On
[Thread #40 for this comm, first seen 29th Jan 2026, 05:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
If a project doesn’t make it dead simple to manage via docker compose and environment variables, just don’t use it.
I run close to 100 services all using docker compose and it’s an incredibly simple, repeatable, self documenting process. Spinning up some new things is effortless and takes minutes.
Sometimes you see a program and it starts with “Clone this repo” and it has a docker compose file, six env files, some extra fig files, and consists of a front end container, back end container. Database container, message queueing container, etc… just close that web page and don’t bother with that project lol.
I agree with that 3rd paragraph lol. That’s probably some of my issue at times. As far IT goes, does it not get overwhelming of you had a 9 hour workday just to hear someone at home complain this other thing you run doesn’t work and you have to troubleshoot that now too?
Without going into too much detail, I’m a solo operation guy for about 200 end users. We’re a Win11 and Office shop like most, and I’ve upgraded pretty much every system since my time starting. I’ve utilized some self-host options too, to help in the day to day which is nice as it offloads some work.
It’s just, especially after a long day, to play IT at home can be a bit much. I don’t normally mind, but I think I just know the Windows stuff well enough through and through, so taking on new Docker or self host tools stuff is Apple’s and oranges sometimes. Maybe I’m getting spoiled with all the turn key stuff at work, too.
Not trying to start any measuring contest, but what I’ve learned is that there are always people out there that does things 100x more than I do. So yes, 1500 Docker composes are a thing, and I’ve witnessed some composes with over 10k lines.
That doesn’t sound the least bit fun lol
honestly, i 100% do not miss GUIs that hopefully do what you want them to do or have options grayed out or don’t include all the available options etc etc
i do get burnout, and i suffer many of the same symptoms. but i have a solution that works for me: NixOS
ok it does sound like i gave you more homework, but hear me out:
- with NixOS and flakes you have a commit history for your lab services, all centralized in one place.
- this can include as much documentation as you want: inline comments, commit messages, living documents in your repository, whatever
- even services that only provide a Docker based solution can be encapsulated and run by Nix, including using an alternate runtime like podman or containerd
- (this one will hammer me with downvotes but i genuinely do think that:) you can use an LLM agent like GitHub Copilot to get you started, learn the Nix language and ecosystem, and create Nix modules for things that need to be wrapped. i’ve been a software engineer for 15 years; i’ve got nothing to prove when it comes to making a working system. what i want is a working system.
Lost me at LLMs. My Nix config is over 20k lines long at this point, neatly split into more than a hundred modules and managing 8 physical machines and 30+ VMs. I love it.
But every time I’ve tried to use an LLM for nix, it has failed spectacularly.
Use portainer for managing docker containers. I prefer a GUI as well and portainer makes the whole process much more comfortable for me.
Why did I never think of that?! That would make sense lol. Thank you!
No problem. I have been using it for a while and I really like it. There’s nothing stopping you from doing it the old fashioned way if you find you don’t like portainer but once you familiarize yourself with it I think you’ll be hooked on the concept.
+1 for Portainer. There are other such options, maybe even better, but I can drive the Portainer bus.
I’m sick of everything moving to a docker image myself. I understand on a standard setup the isolation is nice, but I use Proxmox and would love to be able to actually use its isolation capabilities. The environment is already suited for the program. Just give me a standard installer for the love of tech.
NixOS for the win! Define your system and services, run a single command, get a reproducible, Proxmox-compatible VM out of it. Nixpkgs has basically every service you’d ever want to selfhost.
You can still use VMs and do containers in there. That’s what I do, makes separating different services very easy.
I thought that was the point of supporting OCI in the latest version so you can pull docker images and run them like an lxc container
I just have yunohost do like 90% ofbthebwork nowadays. My day job is docker/cli so the last thing i want to do is more of it.
Never heard of that, definitely checking it out!
I wouldn’t say im stick of it, but it can be a lot of work. It can be frustrating at times, but also rewarding. Sometimes I have to stop working on it for a while when I get stuck.
In any case, I like it a lot better than being Google’s bitch.
Good point. I think I’ve got so caught up between projects at home and work I need a break from both.
I have to stop working on it for a while when I get stuck.
I feel you there bro. Sometimes, when I’m creating a piece of music, I get to a point where, I’m just not making any progress, I’ll step of for a piece, let it simmer for a bit. Same with servers in general for me. It’s the reason I have a test server and have, in the past, leaned a bit heavily on a few backups. LOL! I can screw something up quick when I’m frustrated. The reward for me is learning something new. It’s a rewarding and useful hobby for me. among others.
Just 15 containers? lol
do you get lab burnout
Not really. I have everything set the way I want it and it’s stable. On occasion, I’ll see a container that catches my fancy, so I’ll spin it up on a test server, dick around with it, and monitor it before I ever decide to put it on my production server. On occasion I’ll have to fix, or adjust something. Most of the time I’m just enjoying it. I wouldn’t say I was running anything super complex tho.
As far as time, I’ve got you beat there most likely. Used to be lickity-split, but then you get old, things slow down. LOL Also, there is only one user…me. I realize you have family, but my hard and fast rule is: Multiple users cause issues, so I don’t share. I’d say, go spend your time with the family. That’s the most important.
I’m with you on the incomplete guides. There always seem to be that one ‘secret’ ingredient’ that just didn’t get documented. And to the devs of the opensource software, me love you long time, but please include a screenshot.
Proxmox?
Yeah that’s part of having a hobby. If you do it for work too I can understand getting sick of it. But, no one is making you do it. If you don’t enjoy it, don’t do it.
While this might be a healthy outlook, these days more and more people do not feel like self hosting is a hobby or an option, but a necessity for a free and fair society.
This sooo much. I’m not a tech person but I’m trying to learn because the giant corporations are clearly evil. I just want to have a modicum of privacy in my corner of the world so here I am trying to figure out how to self host some basic services.
This. I self host some things because it’s just fun, other things because of censorship, other things because of privacy. I probably wouldn’t have Nextcloud if Google wasn’t collecting so much data. Probably wouldn’t be self-hosting my blog if content weren’t as censored everywhere. I probably would still be self-hosting a Minecraft server with a small website for said server that the members of the server can contribute to when they find/do something cool.
Nextcloud is on my list lol, but I need to run a separate box for it I think vs visualizing. It would be easier/cleaner and more reliable.
I definitely feel the lab burnout, but I feel like Docker is kind of the solution for me… I know how docker works, its pretty much set and forget, and ideally its totally reproducible. Docker Compose files are pretty much self-documenting.
Random GUI apps end up being waaaay harder to maintain because I have to remember “how do I get to the settings? How did I have this configured? What port was this even on? How do I back up these settings?” Rather than a couple text config files in a git repo. It’s also much easier to revert to a working version if I try to update a docker container and fail or get tired of trying to fix it.
I do it in sprints. I’ll set up a service, test it, get it working, then share it with the family.
I hear you on the instructions. A lot of these are pet projects that just happen to work well enough to share, so a bit of work is needed to implement them. If you document for others, you find that you can’t ever put every step in there because you can’t control all the variables.
