> I’ve tried using it on a desktop before and rolling that back cleanly isn’t exactly straightforward.

Well, sure, but Proxmox was never intended to be a desktop solution.

It was always intended as a server solution, installed on bare-metal, and therefore "rolling-back" is a re-format and re-install (or shredding the drives if the server is being decommissioned).

That’s fair, but that kind of reinforces my point.

If the expected recovery path is “wipe and reinstall,” then it’s clearly not just a thin layer on top of Debian. It’s effectively its own platform with its own assumptions, lifecycle, and upgrade path.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s a very different model from something that can coexist with or cleanly detach from the base system. That distinction matters depending on how people want to use it, especially outside of a dedicated bare-metal server context.

So yeah, Proxmox is built on Debian, but in practice it behaves more like a tightly integrated appliance than a simple UI sitting on top.