alt Hacker News> Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, ...
Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc.
To me a homelab is the 2020's version of having fun with computing: there's something incredibly refreshing in disconnecting my sub-LAN from the Internet and still have music, movies, private pastebin (yup I use this at times between computers for simple stuff I don't want to both scp'ing), private Git repositories, complete backup system (including offline HDDs/SSDs that I rotate into a safe at the bank), etc.
A movie projector, a dumb one, is another very cool thing: connected to nothing but a HDMI cable (not that HDMI is the best standard ever but it does the job).
And to be sure I can still code and work without having a nanny holding my hand as if I was a toddler, I regularly have coding sessions where I don't use Claude Code (but I also pay for a subscription: these things aren't mutually exclusive).
For anyone who wants to have a fun, a used HP Workstation with ECC memory is basically $200 and makes a perfectly fine server at home. Doesn't need to be up 24/7 either: my online service that is up 24/7 is my unbound DNS resolver and I run that one on a Raspberry Pi (for the low power consumption). The rest of my homelab (two Proxmox servers) is basically something I only need when I'm awake/at my desk. So I turn them off at night.
You never go full cloud.
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"Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc."
dude this is way more than "power user" you're being unserious.
If you tell a genuine power user, someone comfortable with Windows registry edits, Office macros, maybe some light PowerShell scripting, that they can "totally do what my brother did," and then the actual task list is Proxmox installation, IOMMU group isolation, VFIO stub drivers, GPU passthrough debugging, RAID configuration, and multi-OS VM management, subnetting, raid and HBA configuration, you're setting them up for a brutal wall of frustration.
It's kind of funny that people are talking about "home labs" as a new thing because I've been running some form of servers on consumer PC hardware in my home since around 1998. For me this was an inseparable part of getting to know Linux and *BSD in that era.
I guess I'm just old though.