Cool, I haven’t tried either of those.

I’m the type of person who likes to upgrade my systems via the terminal because I like to know the detailed processes, but I’ve also burned myself numerous times; hence my preference for declarative and immutable/atomic solutions.

It’s (quite) a bit more of a hassle, but I’ve lost trust in GUIs.

k3s is fairly simple (as far as k8s distros go). Helm is good to start with but for the long run I recommend using kubernetes manifests directly (i.e. kubectl apply -f pvc.yaml, deployment.yaml, etc) rather than helm, because there are quite a few gotchas with helm which can cause trouble. Besides that, it’s good practice to use the –secrets-encryption flag on the server node(s), and if you’re deploying agent nodes it’s good to use bootstrap tokens (k3s token create)