Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor
19 comments
·November 5, 2025genshii
victorbjorklund
Interesting. Is there anything else that is better than proxmox? Like performance etc?
aborsy
Incus is more comparable to LXD than proxmox. IncusOS is different though.
LXD containers also are unprivileged by default.
guipsp
You might be mixing up LXC and LXD
gchamonlive
Even I that worked for a long while with this tech would mix them up time and again, I think it's understandable.
udev4096
Profiles are really great. It's like cloud-init on steroids
k_bx
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
azov
I was hoping for easy backup via zfs send as well, but turns out it’s not so easy atm.
IncusOS does not give you shell access, you have to figure out IncusOS ways to do things via their CLI/API. I haven’t found an easy way to do incremental backup of the whole system yet. You can backup individual instances/volumes via incus export (which seems to use zfs send under the hood), but not the whole thing.
I have mixed feelings about their decision not to give you shell access. Guess those who want flexibility can always just install Incus on top of any Linux they like…
dizhn
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.
gchamonlive
AFAIK LXD is still opensource, as are most if not all products from Canonical. I think the fork is because LXD when it was moved to Canonical made the community uneasy because of the way that they would integrate with Ubuntu lifecycle and tooling.
https://github.com/canonical/lxd it's AGPL-V3
seabrookmx
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.
kosinus
You can also start QEMU/KVM powered VMs with Incus, I assume that's also possible with IncusOS?
k_bx
Incus supports both qemu and lxc
udev4096
It's a lot more than that. Clustering, storage drivers, networking, etc makes up a whole virtual machine manager. It never says it's a hypervisor, it's a VMM as outlined on it's github: "Powerful system container and virtual machine manager"
leoedin
I guess IncusOS (and Incus) achieve similar goals to ProxMox? Has anyone used both and have any opinions on how they perform?
udev4096
I have switched to incus and it's really great. It's lightweight, has a working terraform provider, easy-to-use cli, pre-built images (LXC and VM) of major distros, runs on any distro (on proxmox, you're stuck with debian), clustering is nice, supports bunch of storage drivers (dir, btrfs, ceph, zfs), simple web UI and active community. The project leader is also very active and helpful while in proxmox, it's a little unresponsive. You can even install `incus-base` package which only contains LXC specific components for only running LXC containers.
I have noticed incus has better security configs by default. For instance, all pre-built images come with secureboot enabled and there are ACLs which are easy to configure for fine-grained network rules. The only downside I feel like is lack of something like PBS
athoneycutt
Though IncusOS itself is based on Debian so for the first point against Proxmox I guess using Incus on your OS of choice would be better?
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.