I know we have cockpit but it never really clicked for me. Functionality wise too crashy and not so nicely intergrated, design wise it has the information density of a grandparent brick phone.
It’s kind of funny, Debian was my distro of choice since I was 15, so about 10 years up until last year. I still envy its huge application ecosystem. But over time I’ve come to really appreciate simplicity and the principle of least astonishment.
I originally started Sylve with an OpenWRT/LFS mindset since I had a lot of experience there. But even then, Linux often feels a bit cobbled together. ZFS is awkward because of the GPL vs CDDL situation, userland and kernel development feel disconnected, and there are so many different ways to do the same thing. I won’t even get into systemd, you get the idea.
What really clicked for me was using a system where the kernel and userland are developed together. That cohesion makes a big difference. Technically, I was able to rely almost entirely on the base OS without pulling in extra dependencies, aside from libvirt to make migration easier and Samba for file sharing.
Going forward, Sylve leans into that even more. PF for the firewall, the rock solid iSCSI implementation in base, even things like smart(8) written by src committers just feel more consistent and thought through.
So yeah, Debian definitely wins on features and applications. But for me, FreeBSD wins on coherence and design.
The entire Sylve bundle (backend + frontend) is ~55 MB, fully self-contained, and doesn’t mess with the base system in any destructive way. You can drop it in and remove it cleanly.
Proxmox, on the other hand, replaces core parts of the system, including the kernel, and its package ecosystem diverges quite a bit from standard Debian. I’ve tried using it on a desktop before and rolling that back cleanly isn’t exactly straightforward.
At that point it’s more of a tightly coupled platform built on Debian than just “a UI on top,” especially when the underlying system is no longer behaving like Debian in the usual sense.
> I’ve tried using it on a desktop before and rolling that back cleanly isn’t exactly straightforward.
Well, sure, but Proxmox was never intended to be a desktop solution.
It was always intended as a server solution, installed on bare-metal, and therefore "rolling-back" is a re-format and re-install (or shredding the drives if the server is being decommissioned).
That’s fair, but that kind of reinforces my point.
If the expected recovery path is “wipe and reinstall,” then it’s clearly not just a thin layer on top of Debian. It’s effectively its own platform with its own assumptions, lifecycle, and upgrade path.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s a very different model from something that can coexist with or cleanly detach from the base system. That distinction matters depending on how people want to use it, especially outside of a dedicated bare-metal server context.
So yeah, Proxmox is built on Debian, but in practice it behaves more like a tightly integrated appliance than a simple UI sitting on top.
Well said, you get what I'm looking for. This might be the reason for me to give freebsd a go. Though my current hardware probably wouldn't play nice with it.
I know we have cockpit but it never really clicked for me. Functionality wise too crashy and not so nicely intergrated, design wise it has the information density of a grandparent brick phone.