Please use Dockge instead of Portainer.

Dockge makes it much easier to actually see what’s happening in the deployment process and debug any issues, instead of presenting the error on a small popup that vanishes after 0.3 seconds, and it gives you much better feedback when you misconfigure something in your compose file. It also makes it much easier to interact with your setup from the command line once you feel comfortable doing that. And the builtin docker run to docker compose feature is really handy.

Newbies will find Dockge much friendlier, and experienced users will find that it respects their processes and gets out of the way when you want it out of the way.

Absolutely. A lot of the time the biggest difficulty with researching something is not even knowing the right terms to search for. Asking a few questions can give you a starting point to know where and how to look.

And the thing is, I personally hate asking questions on forums and the like. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve done it. I’m very good at digging up answers by myself, and I generally do work better with essays than I do with conversations. But my experience should not be seen as the default, and people shouldn’t be shit on for trying to learn through community rather than through textbooks.

So, when you create a virtual machine in KVM, you have the ability to attach a Spice or VNC display to the VM.

Unlike running VNC inside the virtual machine, what this does it is runs VNC on the host, at a port that you designate (or a randomly assigned port if you don’t designate) and then you can view that by connecting to the host through VNC. For Spice its exactly the same, except you use something like the Remote Viewer application to connect to it.

As others have mentioned, the easiest way of handling all of this is with Virtual Machine Manager, which integrates its own Spice console and makes everything happen automagically. You can also install Cockpit with the Cockpit-Machines plugin on the host, which gives you a web interface for controlling virtual machines, just like vmware esxi. The display manager on cockpit is pretty rough at the moment though.

KVM is a very “build it yourself” virtualization solution. I use it extensively, and I love it, but you’ll need to be prepared for a lot of “Oh, KVM doesn’t do that, that’s handled by this program/library/whatever”. It’s definitely not a user friendly toolkit. If you’re looking for a Workstation Player alternative, you may be better off with something like Virtbox (although do try out Virtual Machine Manager first, it’s really slick and for your use case probably solves all the problems I’ve mentioned). If you’re looking for an esxi alternative, maybe look into Proxmox.

I’ve been looking for documentation on this but Google search is now so bad that technical documents are completely hidden behind marketing blurbs or LLM generated rubbish.

Its honestly tragic that people feel the need to put these disclaimers. “Just google it” was always a shitty response to people asking legitimate questions (some people learn better from conversational interaction rather than just reading an essay), but with the slow death of search engines we’re now experiencing, at this point anyone who yells “Just google it” needs to be ejected into the fucking sun.

There’s a few reasons, but number one for me is how incredibly clean the UI is.

Plex is a mess. Half of it is just premium shit they’re trying to convince you to use. The actual “stream my own media” functionality is buried at the bottom of the menus.

Trying to get nontechnical family to use Plex was always a challenge, just because of how busy it is. I’ve never had this problem since moving to Jellyfin.

The reason you can’t reserve an address with 178 in the third segment is because a) it’s not in your DHCP reservation pool and b) it’s not even in your network.

Most home routers use /24 networks (as a subnet mask this is given as 255.255.255.0). This describes how much of the IP address is the network, and how much is the device address. Think of this as like the area code in a phone number. Within a particular area code only the last seven digits change, because those are the digits assigned to individual devices. In most home networks, only the last quarter of the IP address changes (ie, everything after the last period). Changing anything in front of that means you’re trying to dial an entirely different network, which can’t be done without some fairly complicated additional setup.