An old laptop from about 13 years ago barely breaks a sweat running proxmox and a handful of containers and two vms.

Waste not want not. Plus it comes with a keyboard, touchpad and monitor. Plus, built in ups. You might need to add a USB Ethernet dongle but you don’t have to.

I bet just about anyone you know has their old laptop in a drawer somewhere. They’d probably give it to you.

Running any LLM on truenas is not awesome. I’ve tried it with GPU passthrough and it’s just too much overhead. I may just burn all my stuff down and restart with Proxmox, run Truenas core inside just for NAS. The idea of a converged nas+virtualization is wonderful, but it’s just not there.

The host networking model alone is such a pain, then you get into performance stuff. I still like Truenas a lot, but I think that Proxmox is probably still the better platform.