The best home server OS in 2026 isn't trying to be a NAS at all

Proxmox is recommended as the best home server OS for 2026, outperforming NAS-focused operating systems like TrueNAS when used as a primary OS. The author argues that NAS OSes limit what home servers can do, while Proxmox's virtualization platform lets you run a NAS OS inside a VM alongside other workloads. Key benefits highlighted include LXC containers, VM management via a web UI, high availability clustering, GPU passthrough, snapshot backups, and community helper scripts for easy setup. The author shares personal experience running a dozen Linux VMs and virtualizing Home Assistant, media servers, and NAS storage on a single machine.