Published May 10, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT Shekhar Vaidya is a veteran technology journalist and computer science engineer. He is the founder of TechLatest, where he has spent years providing technical analysis on hardware and Windows ecosystems. Now a Computing Writer at XDA, Shekhar leverages his deep background in NAS, storage solutions, and PC internals to help readers master their tech. Most people and guides on the internet will suggest that aspiring home lab enthusiasts install Proxmox as the foundation. Whether it’s a Reddit post, YouTube video, or tech forum discussion, the advice is usually the same: gather hardware, install a hypervisor, separate everything into virtual machines, and start building an enterprise-grade infrastructure from day one. After going through most of the online guides, I also expected that I would eventually end up there. The funny thing is, today, almost a year later, my homelab is running on a bare-metal Debian server, and all services are on Docker.…