So I saw a blog post linked on here the other week about someone's homelab where they use #Incus to run all their containers and VMs. And I've fallen into the rabbit hole.
That post: https://linderud.dev/blog/personal-infrastructure-setup-2026/
Anyway, Incus is the fork/successor to #LXD which as recently as last year they released #IncusOS which is a very slimmed down OS for running multiple types of containers and VMs. A bit like #Proxmox in a sense.
What I like about the distro:
- Immutable
- A-side/B-side partition layout for friendlier updates
- Requires Secure Boot + TPM, resulting in encrypted drives by default
- ZFS. I've loved ZFS for many years.
It really seems like this was built for edge type deployments where secure "appliance" like things really excel yet still a net benefit elsewhere.
Since vSphere was killed, this feels pretty damn close to what I liked about it.
Can already run VMs along side "System Containers" (shared kernel + init system) and "App Containers" (what everyone calls "Docker"). I see on the roadmap support for MicroVMs (OCI container + individual kernel).
I run all of my stuff bar storage on #k3s on baremetal but there's times when I need a VM or different container behaviour than it offers.
