I really like Syncthing, Nextcloud, Forgejo and Mailcow to collaborate with colleagues.
Kimai allows me to track hours and get paid.
Barrier allows me to use several computers at once.
Xen Orchestra is pretty much on par with VMWare stuff and way cheaper.
What other awesome software does allow you to work more efficiently in a business context and stays out of your way?
Depends on what level of responsiveness you need from the support team. I run it in my home lab and haven’t needed to raise any tickets as all the info I need to solve problems is readily available on their forums or in assorted blog posts. A company relying on it for their critical infrastructure would probably be best-served with Standard (4-hr response within a business day) or Premium (2-hr response within a business day).
If those still aren’t quick enough it may be worth looking into a partner of theirs, or into another commercial option altogether. I’ve interacted with the Red Hat support team on some high-severity issues and they are top-tier; that was unrelated to virtualization, though, and they tend to push the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization solution quite hard. I’m talking a response time of minutes.
If I’m using kvm on any standalone (non-clustered) hosts on the data center it’s typically on Ubuntu LTS, knowing that the company I work for has a Canonical support agreement in their back pocket, but we haven’t needed it.
Thanks for sharing your experience, I was interested to know what are the best options for a home lab. I will look into KVM.