OP here. It’s less about Sylve doing something Proxmox can’t do, and more about a bunch of QoL improvements that come from us being heavy Proxmox users and building what we felt was missing.
A few concrete things:
ZFS-first UX: Not just "ZFS as storage”, but everything built around it. Snapshots, clones, ZVOLs, replication, all cleanly exposed in the UI without dropping to CLI.
Simple backups without extra infra: Any remote box with SSH + ZFS works. No need to deploy something like PBS just to get decent backups.
Built-in Samba shares: You can spin up and manage shares directly from the UI without having to manually configure services.
Magnet / torrent downloader baked in: Sounds small, but for homelab use it removes a whole extra container/VM people usually end up running.
Clustering: but not all-or-nothing, You can cluster nodes when you need it, and also disable/unwind it later. Proxmox clusters are much more rigid once set up.
Templates done right: Create a base VM/jail once and spin up N instances from it in one go, straight from the UI.
FreeBSD base: It's not really a benefit of Sylve, but rather the ecosystem that FreeBSD provides.. Tighter system integration, smaller surface area, no systemd, etc. (depending on what you care about)
None of this is to say Proxmox is bad, it’s great. This is more "we used it a lot, hit some friction points, and built something that feels smoother for our workflows."
I get the impression bhyve does all that stuff too. Is sylve basically just a thin GUI wrapper on top?
(That'd be amazing if it's possible to do stuff like dump configs + check them into git from the cli, then stand them up on any bhve/sylve box later...)
Without looking at the Sylve docs, I'll conjecture that it has deeper integration with ZFS. With a foundation on FreeBSD, there is a likelihood Sylve can support ZFS-on-root rollbacks better than hacking it into Proxmox. A rollback capability is why I'm looking for Proxmox alternatives. In the Linux world, Talos Linux and IncusOS provide A/B updates which achieve a similar rollback capability. With something based on FreeBSD, your "immutable" OS and all of it's data can be treated equally as ZFS datasets. There's also a higher risk that a Linux kernel update will break ZFS.
Regardless of the number of drives available, you gain an advantage when your file system can leverage snapshots to roll backwards or forwards. There are other Linux-native filesystems that can provide this capability too, but many admins prefer ZFS because the full range of capabilities is unparelleled.
Perhaps I'm missing your point, but proxmox+lxc on zfs storage works fine in proxmox? If just looks like any other storage in proxmox and on commandline you've got all the usual zfs tools
I think it comes down to the standard argument against ZFS on linux -- uncertainty. It works *now*. Will it continue to work? Will any upstream changes in the Linux kernel cause issues with the ZFS modules bolted on top?
It is unlikely for there to be issues with ZFS and Linux. It's too common now, but it's not included in the main Linux tree, so it's not explicitly tested.
So, it's a low risk, but not zero risk.
More to the point here, when working with FreeBSD, ZFS is a first-class citizen (moreso even), so working with it *should* be more integrated with a FreeBSD solution than Proxmox, but how much more (and is that meaningful) is probably a qualitative feel than quantitative fact.
Sylve appears to be a FreeBSD/BSD exclusive implementation of managing vms, etc.
Proxmox is Debian/Ubuntu based.
Both will have their advantages. It might not be about better or worse, the particular things you use may in some cases run better on BSD, or the security management could more fit what you are after.
The problem with these kind of posts is that "How" is almost useless, I can tell you how the bubble pops: The value of these AI companies crash and take out a lots of other stuff with it.
The interesting questions are: "What triggers it" and "what also goes tits up"?
The issue with high/international finance is that a good percentage of it (if not more) is fraudulent or semi fraudulent bollocks.
"Here is a startup that is worth x million because y" Both of those statements are bollocks. However its in the interest of most people to agree with that bollocks to get money. If enough money is given there is a chance that the startup will make money.
If we look a few year back, NFTs fulfil that niche quite nicely. It was obviously bollocks, but a very convenient way to launder money, or run a series of rugpull operations.
The problem we have to contend with now is that the sheer amount money that has been invested all disappearing at once would require 2007/8 levels of coordination to unfuck. The US government does not have the requisite number of admins to pull that off again, and no political will to ever have that expertise again. So if AI does go pop, and it takes a lot of money with it, I would put a guess on china doing the money lubrication and extracting a subtle but richly ironic level of control in exchange
Also, its no guarantee that AI will trigger the next bubble popping, my money is on Private Equity.
> The problem with these kind of posts is that "How" is almost useless, I can tell you how the bubble pops: The value of these AI companies crash and take out a lots of other stuff with it.
That's like saying "I know exactly how you're going to die, your heart will stop"
Addictive patterns in games and other online activity is a bit less innocent than you are portraying it: knowingly causing harm is too low a standard. A lot of the profitability of online games, prediction markets, etc. comes from the whales. The whales are probably addicted. If your business is a whale hunt you are possibly causing harm at least to the extent that addiction is dangerous.
I think there is a fourth portion that is probably more important:
Actively ignoring harm caused by your product. TV/radio has sold attention, but there were pretty strict rules on what you can/can't broadcast, and to whom. (ignoring cable for the moment) Its the same for services, things that knowingly encourage damaging behaviours are liable for prosecution.
Except cable is the more apt comparison here - broadcast rules exist because airwaves are an extremely finite resource and so we can argue that the government has a vested interest in what kind of speech can happen on them. No such scarcity exists with web services.
> My understanding is that DC breakers are somewhat prone to fires for this reason, too.
I think its that DC breakers are more expensive, so people use AC rated breakers instead. They are both rated for 400v @10 amps, its the same thing right?
It turns out they are not, and most people, even electronics types rarely play with 200v+ of DC.
Immersion cooling was/is so fucking impractical it is only useful for very specific issues. If you talk to any engineer who worked on CRAY machines that were full of liquid freon, they'll tell how hard it is to do quick swaps of anything.
Its much cheaper, quicker and easier to use cooling blocks with leak proof quick connectors to do liquid cooling. It means you can use normal equipment, and don't need to re-re-enforce the floor.
A lot of "edge" stuff has 12/48v screw terminals, which I suspect is because they are designed to be telco compatible.
For megawatt racks though, I'm still not really sure.
We had a cluster of liquid cooled CDC Cyber mainframes. One of them developed a bad leak and managed to drain itself into the raised floor. This was a Very Bad Day for many folks in the computer center.
> Big IP is strong arming OpenAI, Suno, and all the rest.
> It'll be interesting to see whether creators at the bottom of the pyramid can effectively create new brands
The problem is, to create a brand, you need to be able to protect it against rivals either ripping you off, or diluting it.
The same mechanism that protects "big" IP is also protect everyone else, even the small people.
> they'll go directly to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit and force them to obtain licenses
They already do that for music. But the issue is this, if we want culture, we need to find a way to pay for it. Is it possible for a bunch of mates to make enough money to live on playing in a local band? not really. They can only really make money if they either have a viable local gigging scene, or large enough online following to sell merch/patreon.
The big IP merchants were quite keen for videogen, because they sense that its possible to cut out the expensive artists. If they can not pay actors, writers, artists, then its way more profitable for them. This is part of the reason why AI hasn't been hit with the napster ban hammer.
I think the other thing to remember is that creating good IP is hard, and you can't really just pull it out of your arse after 5 minutes. The original seed takes a long time to refine, test, evolve. Even the half arsed sequels require work.
Or better, how does it do it better than proxmox?
This isn't to say that proxmox is the best thing since sliced bread, I'm curious as to what makes sylve better, is it the API?
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