If you don’t want to have any freedom until you have it all, you’ll be slave forever.

You’re letting perfect get in the way of good enough.

I don’t know about tailscale, but it seems pihole has got you covered with local DNS, if you’re willing to set the local DNS records manually.

I use pihole as selfhosted DNS server for all my servers and clients. I don’t have many local DNS records (only 2), so if you handle a great amount of ever-changing DNS records, this might not be for you.

To me it seems like:

• you want to do a lot of stuff yourself on arch
• but there’s quite some complicated stuff to learn and try

I’d try Proxmox VE and, if you’re also searching for a Backup Server, Proxmox Backup Server.

I recommend these because:

• Proxmox VE is a Hypervisor, you can just spin up Arch Linux VMs for every task you need
• Proxmox VE, as well as Proxmox BS are open source
• you can buy a license for “stable updates” (you get the same updates, but delayed, to fix problems before they get to you)
• includes snapshots, re-rolls, full-backups, a firewall (which you can turn on or off for every VM), …

I personally run a Proxmox VE + Proxmox BS setup in 3 companies + my own homelab.

It’s not magic, Proxmox VE is literally Debian 13 + qemu + kvm with a nice webui. So you know the tech is proven, it’s just now you also get an easy to use interface instead of virsh console commands or virt-manager.

I personally like a stable infrastructure to test and run my important and experimental tuff upon. That’s why I’m going with this instead of managing even the hypervisor myself with Arch.

Thank you very much. I sent this to my coworker who expressed interest in switching to vim :)

It seems nobody really tested 11 to 13, or maybe any kind of major-version-skipping and you won’t find direct experiences here.

Your best bet is to follow the official procedure, so 11 -> 12 -> 13. I’ll leave you with the official upgrade guide for 11 to 12 and 12 to 13.

It seems longer than it is, as not every step is actually required for every system. When upgrading VMs, a snapshot pre-upgrade can also help you skip backup-steps in the guides.