I ran bare ESXi at home for a long time, and for what it is, it's solid. But the free hypervisor is deliberately hobbled in the ways that matter to a tinkerer, and I'd hit the edges of all of them. So this weekend I wiped it and put Proxmox on instead.
Three things drove the switch. First, ZFS as a first-class citizen. On ESXi, storage is a thing you bolt on; on Proxmox I get ZFS in the installer, with snapshots, send/receive and compression for free, and I can actually trust the SMART data because I'm on a normal Debian underneath. Second, LXC containers. Not everything needs a full VM, and being able to run lightweight containers alongside KVM guests on the same box is exactly the flexibility ESXi never wanted to give me. Third, and this is the one I underrated: it's just Linux. SSH in and there's apt, there's a real shell, there's zpool status. No more fighting an appliance that resents being administered.
The migration itself was unglamorous. I didn't try to convert the VMDKs in place; I spun fresh VMs on Proxmox, restored the handful of services that matter from their backups, and binned the rest. Half my old ESXi VMs were experiments I'd long stopped caring about, so it was a decluttering as much as a migration.
It's not all roses. The Proxmox web UI is busier and less polished than vSphere's, and there's the occasional rough edge where you can tell it's a community project wearing an enterprise coat. But I'll take a slightly scruffy interface over a locked-down appliance any day, because when something breaks at home I want a shell, not a support contract I don't have. A week in, no regrets.