I'd had a bit of Linux server experience, but no desktop Linux. I tried Pop!_OS on an old macbook and everything just worked. I could figure out what was going on without any drama.
lol - great question. I was very excited at the start and did things like talk to a guy in Spain with 5W and a long bit of wire out in the bush, talked to people 400 km away by pointing a handheld antenna directly at a satellite as it passed overhead, received images directly from the amateur station on the ISS, met a heap of smart old guys who were doing interesting things with radio - designing antennas, setting up repeater networks etc. I went in a couple of competitions (in ham radio this is usually about how many contacts you can make over a time period). But ultimately, it turns out I like interesting technical problems, learning things, and buying stuff I don't need off the internet - more than chatting to people I don't know. So now I'm more into Linux and self-hosting which scratches a lot of those same itches.
I still have a short range radio in the car and a couple of handheld radios. With these I can key into that Raspberry Pi, have the audio travel over the internet and pop out anywhere in the world there's another AllStar point and go over the air to radios there, but I've sold all my HF gear (that allows you to talk direct to anywhere without infrastructure).
It is an interesting, and quite diverse hobby, and there's a lot of cheap Chinese radios, and a bottom tier license in most countries that's easy to obtain (for example without learning Morse code). I'd recommend it to people interested in tech stuff. It's a hobby that might not exist in 50 years - a lot of the radio spectrum allocated to ham radio in the old days was considered worthless, but now governments regard that as a valuable public asset that can be sold to telecommunication companies. Also there's growing interference from digital gadgets and wireless devices that requires innovative solutions to overcome.
It's a bit like docker, in that it's a sort of isolated system, but you use it more like a virtual machine (VM). It's lighter than a VM because it uses the host kernel so you can run lots of them with out consuming too many resources.
In the Proxmox web interface, up in the top right corner there's a "Create CT" button. If you click through all that (once again I am recommending Ubuntu) you'll have your first LXC container up in a couple of minutes - the quick creating is another advantage over VM's. One of the joys of your excellent choice of Proxmox as a base is that you can easily experiment with such things.
One 3B+ runs my network services - things I need to stay up if I restart the production server. Another one has a specialist role - IP gateway into the ham radio AllstarLink network - connected to a 70cm radio with a modified USB sound dongle.
I run one VM which some small docker containers go on, but whenever I'm trying something out it's always in a Debian or Ubuntu VM - things just usually work easier. If it turns out to be a service I'm serious about running, then I'll sometimes spend the time to set it up in it's own LXC. Even a single Docker container.
I much prefer each service in it's own VM or LXC - for that same reason. Easier backups, easier to move to other nodes, easier to see the resources being used.
@moddy with that processor and your 8GB you have plenty of room to play with multiple VM's. Headless Ubuntu is probably the best place to start just because of the volume of results you get when googling issues. Enjoy.
This was the route I went with when I started, and I've never had cause to regret it. For people near the start of their self-hosting journey, it's the no-hassle, reliable choice.
Lol, I was more thinking Nano is a hufflepuff who's just really easy to be around. Who needs rock climbing when you can just lie in on Sunday mornings scrolling your phone and showing each other memes.
I went this route - Synology NAS and a couple of HP Mini G2 800s running Proxmox for my compute loads. And I would recommend that arrangement for someone just getting started in self-hosting. Get going quickly and safely and put your effort into the cool stuff.
That said, I've drunk the ZFS kool-aid and have learned enough along the way to consider moving to TrueNAS or similar on some sort of low power setup in the future. I'm in no hurry.
I'm probably a medium-techincal people :-) Wireguard won't do the NAT traversal right? I can't do the port forwarding thing because of the CGNAT for my connection.
My use case is for domains hosted on a VPS rather than my home server-hosted stuff. None of that is exposed to the internet except via Tailnet. I've got a domain saved up for that but haven't figured it out how to do it since the CA can't access my server to verify it. I have the feeling the answer is going to be ten more commenters telling me to check out Caddy.
I'd had a bit of Linux server experience, but no desktop Linux. I tried Pop!_OS on an old macbook and everything just worked. I could figure out what was going on without any drama.