If it’s relevant to your actual job, learning to use k8s will benefit you more. Generally i’d prefer to keep the bare metal OS as clean as possible to avoid breaking anything during upgrades and such, and keep the containers and normal running apps on separate VMs that can communicate with eachothers, k8s is mostly good if you got a lot of servers and want to manage them all at once through a single “orchestrator”. But for self hosting stuff in your home it’s kinda overkill. But it still can be used to manage things up. So imo go for k8s since it can be used in homeservers, it’s just that it’s kinda like using a nuclear bomb to kill a wasp.

If everything you want to run makes sense to do within k8s it is perfectly reasonable to run k8s on some bare-metal OS. Some things lend themselves to certain ways of running them better than others. E.g. Home Assistant really does not like to run anywhere but a dedicated machine/VM (at least last time I looked into it).

Regardless of k8s it may make sense to run some sort of virtualization layer just to make management easier. One panel you can use to access all of the machines in you k8s cluster from a console level can be pretty nice, and a Proxmox cluster would give you this. You can make a VM on a host that takes up basically all of the available RAM/CPU on it. Proxmox specifically has some built-in niceties with gluster (which I’ve never use, I manage gluster myself on bare metal) which could even be useful inside a k8s cluster for PVCs and the like.

If you are willing to get weird (and experimental) look into Rancher’s Harvester it’s an HCI platform (similar to Proxmox or vSphere) that uses k8s as its base layer and even manages VMs through k8s APIs… I played with it a bit and it was really neat, but opted for bare metal Ubuntu for my lab install (and actually moved from rke2 to k3s to Nomad to docker compose with some custom management/clustering over the course of a few years).

I think it depends on your scale. If homelab stuff docker is awesome IMO.

Containers, unless you have a specific need for a VM.

With a VM you have to reserve resources exclusively. If you give a VM 2gb of ram, then that’s 2gb of ram that you can’t use for other things, even if the guest OS is using less.

With Containers, you only need as many resources as the process inside the container requires at the time.

Why not do both? I run proxmox on my physical hardware, then have guest VMs within proxmox that run k8s.

Advantages of proxmox:

• Proxmox makes it easy to spin up VMs for non self host purposes (say I want to play with NixOS)
• Proxmox snapshots make migrations and configuration changes a bit safer (I recently messed up a postgres 15 migration and was able to roll back in a button press)

You can then just run docker images through Proxmox, but I like k8s (specifically k3s) because:

Advantages of k8s:

• Certmanager means your HTTP services automatically get assigned TLS certs essentially for free (once you’ve set up cert manager for the first time, anyway)
• I find k8s’ YML-based configuration easier to track and manage. I can spin my containers up fresh just from my config, without worrying about stray environment settings I might not have backed up.
• k8s makes it easy for me to reason about which services are exposed internally to each other, and which are exposed on the host outside of my k8s cluster.
• k8s services get persistent DNS and IPs within the cluster, so configuring nodes to talk to each other is very easy.

And yeah, this way I get to learn two technologies rather than one 😁