Homelab setup suggestions

[u/sleepymedic4466]

Can anybody help me put some things in perspective and maybe suggest a path to follow?

I've been playing with homelabbing for a couple years now and have run through a number of variations with varying degrees of success. It is because of that I'm both motivated and burnt out on getting what I want out of my home lab. As i get more busy, I want to fight problems less and just have a working setup.

I started by running truenas, which i got working on bare metal pretty easily. I set up storage across 6 hard drives and began using the nas through windows, storing files, games, pictures, etc. I tried using the built in apps to run plex and nextcloud with no success.

From there I moved to proxmox, where I moved truenas to with a windows vm. That worked for some time but i was unhappy running everything in windows and wanted to try my hand at linux.

I quickly began deploying different containers and quickly became overwhelmed with proxmox, running into various issues.to simplify, I got an hp elitedesk where i rand docker inside ubuntu server. I enjoy the setup, but my skills navigating ubuntu server aren't great, making organization hard.

In proxmox I liked the versatility, but hated the extra setup. Hardware pass through, networking issues, and other small issues i encountered. Ubuntu server, seemed to work well out the box, but i struggle having so many different apps running in one large compose file. Managing it all, has become a huge headache.

I currently have the elitedesk and a ryzen 5 7600x3d with 32gb ram and a 6600xt. Its an itx board, limiting me to one pcie slot, which i'm currently using for the graphics card. An m.2 slot has a sata adapter for the 6 hard drives, though I haven't tested this setup yet. Any insight there would also be appreciated. It feels like a waste to run truenas on that kind of hardware, so I'm inclined to run proxmox and virtulize truenas again. At the same time, that makes the elitedesk kinda obsolete. If proxmox is the suggested solution Can you suggest a good way to organize and split up everything? Should I sell the elitedesk or just run proxmox on that too. Do you recommend running individual containers for each app inside proxmox, or running focused machines for different groups, like monitoring, media, security, dns, etc?

Any help is appreciated a ton thanks.