VMs if you have enough RAM and/or need to run something on a non-compatible system (like pfsense on ARM). Containers for everything else.
this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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If it's relevant to your actual job, learning to use k8s will benefit you more. Generally i'd prefer to keep the bare metal OS as clean as possible to avoid breaking anything during upgrades and such, and keep the containers and normal running apps on separate VMs that can communicate with eachothers, k8s is mostly good if you got a lot of servers and want to manage them all at once through a single "orchestrator". But for self hosting stuff in your home it's kinda overkill. But it still can be used to manage things up. So imo go for k8s since it can be used in homeservers, it's just that it's kinda like using a nuclear bomb to kill a wasp.
I have a pretty low power server at home (Pentium G4560), and the previous one was even slower J3160, so I don't want to unnecessarily hog the CPU with a VM, and the few services I need at home run perfectly fine in containers.
I run pihole, unbound, wireguard, plex, unifi controller in containers, and I run some additional services directly on the host (samba, transmission).
I have a Windows VM on my Windows PC for work, so it's isolated from my main rig (various VPN clients and work files etc), and if I needed some Linux stuff on my Windows PC I'd also run a VM, but more VMs also mean more updating and patching, which is much easier with containers.
also curious abt this
You can try casaOS.
https://github.com/IceWhaleTech/CasaOS
Its something like k8s. But it is easy to use and works very well with docker containers.
I am more comfortable using Ansible and Terraform, so I find VMs more suited for me. Though for random nodejs or PHP apps, I do put them in postman containers and pods.