Take your pick. Everyone wants different things. This site/repo is pretty great.

https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts

it gives me a direct bridge from cursor -> VM, for local dev & test out open source projects

I like having a local server I can carry with me and control using just Cursor to manage it.

So basically the freedom that comes with a homelab without using proxmox UI and ssh.

I personally self-host a bunch of stuff for myself and my household. Nextcloud for my phone, mattermost for in-house communication, private wordpress as a multimedia diary, a bunch of experiments, wekan for organization, network storage, network printer.

I found Turnkey Linux pretty nice. They provide ready to use Linux images for different services. Proxmox integrates with them, so for example to install Nextcloud, all I needed to do is to click around a bunch on the Proxmox interface, and I'm good to go. They have around 80-90 images to choose from.

immich, n8n, openwebui, metube, hoarder, gethomepage, freshrss, tailscale, reverse proxy, on and on it goes.

I do that with containers running on a single-node Kubernetes cluster (k3s). Doing it via the Proxmox UI feels like I'm giving up "control". Maybe that's just because doing it with Kubernetes etc. is closer to how I'd do it at work.

For me Proxmox is mainly a means to be able to have more than 1 pet (partially for simplicity's sake of not having to make everything play well together in the same install, partially because I have some things which require Windows and some things which require Ubuntu).

I guess I do also sometimes use it for ephemeral things without having to worry about cleaning up after too. E.g. I can dork around with some project I saw on GitHub for an afternoon then hit "revert to snapshot" without having to worry about what that means for the permanent stuff running at the same time.