I mean, I somewhat understand where you’re coming from. But I’ve always written in this kind of style, and I think the reason the post ended up sounding this way is simply because it’s meant to share information I personally find interesting or useful. There isn’t really much of a way to explain a setup like this without having sections, lists, and explanations.

Honestly it’s a bit difficult to write something like this and have it not sound “AI-generated”.

Doesn’t help, a lot of people seem to associate the dashes (“-”) with AI writing nowadays, but I’ve been using them for years, so unfortunately that probably doesn’t help my case- rip haha.

Regarding the:

“Dive into the Details. If you’re curious about the configs, the philosophy, or just want to see the messy reality behind the setup, head over to organic-server.org. You’ll find some more of my ramblings there. Or, if you have a specific question, I’m always happy to chat here.”

That part was mainly there because I’ve seen a lot of homelab posts where someone shares a cool setup, but then never responds to questions or expands on anything. I wanted to make it clear that I’m happy to discuss the details if anyone is interested.

Nah, I haven’t. I guess I’m just very verbose- I just want to make sure I’m clearly understood.

Ollama/Openwebui, Immich, Snapotter and cause degoog can use ollama.

I think the misunderstanding is that I’m running every single service as Docker inside its own LXC. That’s not actually what I’m doing.

I split things by service boundary. For example, Pi-hole + Unbound has its own LXC, Lemmy has its own LXC, Immich has its own LXC, etc. Most of those run natively in LXC without Docker at all.

Docker is only there where the application actually expects/benefits from it. I’m not adding a Docker layer everywhere just for the sake of it.

The reason I prefer this over one giant LXC with everything docker- inside. is the management side.

Yes, there is some overhead. But LXC containers are much lighter than VMs. They share the host kernel and use Linux namespaces/cgroups for isolation, so you’re not paying the cost of a full virtualized OS. The extra memory/CPU overhead is minimal compared to the management benefits I get from separating services.

The Docker overhead only exists on the services that actually need Docker. A lot of my services run directly in their own LXC without Docker at all.

Could I put everything into one LXC and run Docker Compose? Sure. It would probably work fine. But for my homelab, ease of maintenance and recovery is just as important as raw resource efficiency.