I’ve been running an Incus cluster of 3 fairly beefy servers for about a year now. It’s my go-to recommendation for anyone wanting to setup a new virtualized environment.

One of my favorite features is how you can tag different cluster members for different architectures. In the same cluster, I can have traditional dual-socket x86 servers with a dozen DIMM slots as well as Raspberry Pis. The architecture tagging lets me strategize execution of ARM-based container workloads to be only on the Pis, or opt to run them via QEMU on the x86 platforms if that makes more sense in a particular scenario. Since I deal with a lot of embedded firmware, this offers a nice, flexible platform.

Stephen Graeber is also a long time contributor to the LXC project and his reasoning behind this fork and other changes are quite sound. I hope the project sees continued success. Stephen’s business model of offering consulting services for Incus systems also seems quite sound.

I used Proxmox for years to run a fairly comprehensive homelab, and a few months ago replaced the entire thing with Incus (on a debian host, haven't tried IncusOS yet). Incus is amazing and it makes so many things so much easier compared to Proxmox.

One thing in particular is permissions in unprivileged containers. In Proxmox, you have to do a bunch of somewhat confusing ID mapping. In Incus, it's as simple as setting "shift=true".

Also the profile system in Incus is really powerful and allowed me to deduplicate a ton of config.

Interesting. I recommend Incus over other hypervisor-oriented OS distributions (Proxmox, etc.), for many reasons, but one minor reason is that you can install it on Debian or Arch or whatever Linux you like. It's a comprehensive management layer for VMs and Linux containers, with good CLI, web UI, cloning/moving/copying/migrating etc., but... why does that need to be an OS?

However, I'm confident that if that is what you want, this is probably fantastic — Incus, including the old LXD (which was mainly built by the same core developers, until Canonical behaved in ways they didn't like, and they hard-forked LXD to create Incus) has been one of my favorite open-source projects for several years.

Fantastic software, steady stream of reliable releases, helpful community... Incus is great.

    incus launch images:nixos/unstable foo -t aws:m1.large

In case there might be people who are not familiar with Incus, it was forked from LXD to keep it open source. It's very good software.

Really excited to try this out. I have a fleet of containers on ubuntu + incus. Not only does this do ZFS optimization, I look forward having easy container optimized backup, live cluster migration (to a different machine without downtime) and so much more.

I use Proxmox on fat servers, but for homelab-like setup Incus OS seems more like a sweet spot

I've been using Incus containers (not VMs) for running tests against a "real" OS and it's been an absolute game changer for me. It's granted me the ability to simultaneously spin up-and-down a plethora of fresh OSes on my local dev machine, which I then use as testing targets for components of my codebase that require Docker or systemd. With traditional containers, it's tricky to mimic those capabilities as they would exist on a normal VM.

Because both my project and Incus are written in Go, orchestrating Incus resources in my test code has been pretty seamless. And with "ephemeral" containers, if things start to get out of hand, I just need to stop the container to clean it up. Much easier than a 2-step process like it usually is.

Looking forward to seeing what's to come in IncusOS!

Incus is very nice and super featured, but suffers from a few issues, namely unintuitive/hard onboarding and bad defaults, which makes giving access to people annoying, as it requires teaching them first and that they can't just make a vm with a few clicks immediately, limited authentication and user control options, like if no external auth users must exist on underlying system, and with limited but very strict auth options requires a full domain and no proxying, currently (might get fixed partially later).

And finally, it suffers from hardcore tracking upstream, ie canonical/lxd(-ui), meaning they won't really do any changes that lxd wouldn't do, and thus are slaved to them : (

Not _technically_ a hypervisor since these are Linux (system) containers and use the same cgroup magic under the hood as docker/containerd.

But this is definitely neat. I've found Incus quite handy for development environments, and a good compliment to docker.