PVE-Electrified Is the Kind of Proxmox Mod That Starts a UI Knife Fight

# PVE-Electrified Is the Kind of Proxmox Mod That Starts a UI Knife Fight PVE-electrified is not trying to be subtle. The showcase promised faster guest start and stop feedback, command buttons directly inside the resource tree, a rewritten React-based resource tree, quicker state icon updates, a new resource-conflict dialog, a hand-drawn logo, and a few visual effects for good measure. That’s a lot of movement for something described as “small new features.” The project also has a roadmap that sounds genuinely useful: RAM usage bars in the tree, warnings before starting guests into an out-of-memory mess, and ZFS disk usage that shows actual usage instead of thick-provisioned fiction. It’s the sort of homelab tool that immediately makes some people excited and others reach for the UI fire extinguisher. ## The Appeal Is Speed, Not Just Sparkle The strongest case for PVE-electrified is simple: the normal Proxmox interface can feel a little too polite when you’re hammering through guest operations. Faster feedback for start and stop actions matters because admins don’t just click buttons for fun. They’re trying to answer a basic question: did the thing happen, or am I waiting on stale UI state? Rewriting the resource tree as a React component may sound like inside-baseball developer chatter, but the goal is practical. Faster icon updates mean less guessing. Less guessing means fewer duplicate clicks, fewer refreshes, and fewer moments where you wonder whether your browser or your node is lying to you. The resource-conflict dialog is the more grown-up feature hiding inside the flashy wrapper. Starting guests is easy. Starting guests into a resource fight is how you create a bad afternoon. The planned RAM helper gets at the same problem: don’t let users blindly crash guests because the host is running out of memory. That’s a very homelab pain point. Plenty of people overcommit because they can, then act shocked when the machine starts bargaining with physics. A UI that warns before the cliff is not just cosmetic. It’s a seatbelt. ## Then the Clutter Argument Arrived The pushback came fast, and it was pointed. One commenter said the command buttons made the tree look cluttered and asked what was wrong with right-clicking. That’s not a nitpick. It’s the classic productivity UI fight: visible buttons versus clean surfaces. Power users often love sparse interfaces because they already know where the actions live. Newer users, or people who want speed over elegance, often prefer obvious controls right in front of them. Neither side is crazy. They’re just optimizing for different kinds of friction. The creator’s answer was practical: click the column header and hide the columns you don’t like, even individual command buttons. That matters. Customizability turns “this UI is too busy” into “this UI starts too busy for my taste.” Those are different complaints. Still, the criticism sticks because defaults have power. A cluttered first impression can make a serious tool feel like a browser extension with too much caffeine. If the point is faster control, the interface has to avoid becoming its own obstacle course. The buttons should feel like shortcuts, not confetti. ## Some People Wanted It in Main. Others Said Absolutely Not. One of the sharpest splits came when someone said they had no idea the project existed and thought it should be rolled into main Proxmox. The response from others was basically: no, please do not. One reply praised Proxmox’s existing developers for building sensible GUIs for actual productive operation. That sounds harsh, but it reveals the fear: Proxmox’s official interface is conservative because it has to be. It’s not just for hobbyists running five guests in a basement. It’s for people managing real infrastructure where visual chaos, flaky state, or surprise behavior has a cost. The creator didn’t oversell it, which helped. They admitted that the current state fits the homelab case, not large deployments. Performance can suffer with more than 100 guests or lots of running guests, and the UI isn’t as stable as the classic manager yet. Sometimes you may need to reload the page. That kind of honesty is refreshing. It also answers the “should this be main?” debate better than any insult could. Not yet. Maybe not ever in this form. But as a playground for ideas Proxmox itself may never prioritize, it has a real reason to exist. ## The Best Features Are the Ones Still Coming The roadmap might be more interesting than the release itself. RAM usage bars in the tree are exactly the kind of thing that sounds obvious after someone says it. If you’re about to start a guest, you should have a quick sense of memory pressure without spelunking through tabs. The planned helper dialog for low-memory starts could save users from the classic homelab faceplant: powering on one more VM and watching something important get squeezed. It’s less about hand-holding and more about giving the UI enough situational awareness to prevent avoidable damage. The ZFS plan is even better. Actual disk usage, not thick-provisioned fantasy, is the difference between knowing your pool and being surprised by it. A UI to list and diagnose disk-space eaters would be huge for anyone who has stared at a storage graph and wondered where the missing space crawled off to die. Proxmox is powerful, but storage visibility can still feel like assembling a crime scene from scattered clues. If PVE-electrified can surface the real culprits cleanly, that’s not just a prettier interface. That’s a troubleshooting tool. ## This Is What Homelab Software Is Supposed to Do The strongest positive comment was also the simplest: good work, looks cool, maybe something to play with later. That’s the right lane. PVE-electrified doesn’t need to dethrone the official Proxmox UI to matter. It can be the weird workshop where useful ideas get tested in public. Some users will hate the density. Some will love the command buttons. Some will save it for later. Some will only trust the stock interface and never touch it. That mix is healthy. Homelabs are where interface experiments should happen before anyone argues about enterprise polish. The danger is pretending every cool enhancement belongs in core immediately. It doesn’t. The opportunity is letting small projects prove which ideas actually reduce pain. Faster state feedback, smarter conflict warnings, visible resource pressure, and real ZFS usage are all aimed at the same thing: making Proxmox feel less like a panel of knobs and more like a system that tells you what’s about to go wrong. That’s worth exploring, even if the current UI makes minimalists twitch. PVE-electrified may be messy around the edges, but it’s pushing on the right nerve: admins don’t just want control. They want the interface to keep up.