Beans

I run Proxmox on my router (an Intel NUC) with an OpenWRT VM (though I used to run OPNSense, and might try going back to it later). It makes things more complicated, but I’m familiar enough with Proxmox that I’m okay with that complexity.

Setup right, I don’t think you’d experience any performance hit in terms of your network, and your 8th gen i7 is likely better than my Celeron J4025, so I imagine your Web UIs will be fast enough even virtualized.

I virtualized my router because it let me experiment with different router options way more easily (I could switch from OPNSense to OpenWRT and fall back on my old OPNSense VM if I messed anything up, I could setup VLANs in a cloned VM and fallback to my old VM if I couldn’t get it working, etc.). I’m a very indecisive person loll. But if there’s no reason for you to virtualize it, then I wouldn’t bother unless you just want to.

I vaguely remember my Intel NIC gave problems with OPNSense, but running virtualized meant I could use Linux drivers (via Proxmox) and give OPNSense a VirtIO NIC that it would be happy with. Oh, and it’s nice being able to run the Unifi Web Server in an LXC on the router so it doesn’t go down whenever I mess with my server PC.

Personally, I only run network-specific things on my Proxmox instance on the router (so, OpenWRT/OPNSense, and the Unifi Web Server). My more home-lab stuff is run on a completely separate machine. Like others have said, I don’t want my internet to go down when I mess with my server.

If you do end up virtualizing ur router, in my personal experience using VirtIO network devices for the VM seems to work best for me (the E1000 seemed to hamper my upload/download speeds quite a bit, VirtIO made it pretty much line-speed — that could just be OpenWRT quirks or my NIC, idk).

Reddit made it simple for me; they banned the app I browsed it with (Boost, along with every other 3rd party app).

I don’t browse on my desktop, and I refuse to use their 1st party app, so using Reddit became too inconvenient.

Touché.

Me and my 100GB of ‘Linux ISOs’:

I prefer buying CDs for music & physical games for my consoles when I can (physical games on PC is kind of a distant dream now…). For TV, I think the only option to actually own your media is through BluRay/DVD. The digital stores (like Amazon, Vudu i think?) only let you watch on their platform & don’t give you any files.

I do have a small number of vinyls & cassettes, but that’s more for novelty than any practicality.

I use a Netgear managed switch, so i don’t know anything about MikroTiks, but if it has an option to set PVIDs (Port VLAN IDs), make sure each port is set to the VLAN you want devices behind it to be on (so, port 2 has untagged ID 20 & its PVID set to 20). This caused issues for me cuz Netgear’s WebUI didn’t make the PVID table obvious (and I had no idea what PVIDs are when setting up my network, lol).

If it helps, I used this guide when setting up VLANs for my network w/OpenWRT: https://wiki.opensourceisawesome.com/books/vlans-and-advanced-setup-on-open-source/page/setup-a-router-firewall-with-vlans-in-openwrt (PDF version here).

I don’t think the Pro 2 has gyro, no. Other models might though, I haven’t looked at their offerings for a good while now, lol.

Never mind, I looked it up and apparently the Pro 2 has gyro in Switch mode. I’ll try it out on my PC and report back, lol. (I’ve never really bothered with gyro, tbh)

Edit: Yeah, I can’t get gyro working. In Switch mode (wired), my PC doesn’t see the controller at all (on Linux 6.12, so it should have drivers for the Nintendo Pro controller — I’ve read that driver has issues with 3rd party controllers anyway, so…)

Interestingly, in “A” mode it shows up as a DS4 controller, but I don’t see any gyro input with it under both Sudachi & RPCS3.

So, maybe it works, but I can’t get it working in under ½ an hour 😅

I’ve got an 8BitDo Pro2. I really like it, but I used to have problems connecting it over Bluetooth (wired would work perfectly fine.)

It just needed a firmware update. You’d probably be fine now (I’ve had my controller for a long time now, and rarely ever gave it an update), but if you experience connection problems with it, I’d try updating the firmware.

After doing that, my controller has worked like a champ ever since.

Ah, of course. In order to avoid bricking your console, you’ve made sure to bless your console. 🙏🙏

On a more serious note, I love how it’s either Bad Apple, Doom, or the Bible that gets ported to things you don’t expect, lol.