Is an old laptop enough for a basic Proxmox homelab, or am I forcing it?

I have an old Lenovo laptop with 12GB RAM and a 512GB SSD just sitting around, and I want to finally use it as a small practice homelab instead of only doing everything in VirtualBox.

Main goal is hands-on learning, not serving a whole house. I mainly want to run Proxmox, Tailscale, and a few small LXCs/VMs for labs and projects.

I know 12GB RAM is the main weak point, so I’m wondering if this is still a solid starting point or if I’m just going to hit limits immediately and get annoyed.

For people who actually run small setups like this:

is this enough to start with realistically?

would you stay mostly with LXCs on this hardware?

any advice, regrets, or better ideas before I set it up?