I ran LXD for about a year in my home lab. Unfortunately, the easiest way to get it running is by installing Snap; which I didn't do. Instead I ran it on Alpine Edge (one of the few distros that actually has it in their package manager). LXD kept breaking after system updates and I got tired of troubleshooting. I suppose that's just part of the perils of running bleeding edge.

When LXD was running, I found that it feels like something between a VM and OCI container. In the whole pets vs cattle analogy, LXD containers definitely feel more like pets.

On the host, concepts are similar to OCI containers (networking, macvlan, port mapping, etc). I like its approach to building up containers with several commands instead of one long command. You can add and remove ports, volumes, and even GPUs to running containers. It doesn't have compose files, I just used bash scripts to create reproducible containers.

Inside the LXD container is where things get different. You're containerizing a whole OS, not an application. So you end up administering your container like a VM. You jump inside it, update its packages, install whatever application and dependencies you need. It doesn't work like a glorified package manager (which is how most homelabbers use Docker). As a long time VM user I actually prefer installing things myself, but I can see this turning away many people in the selfhosting community.

I liked LXD and would've kept using it if it weren't so intimately linked to Snap. Last month it failed to start my containers after a system update...again. So I moved that box over to Rocky with Podman containers running as SystemD units. I do kinda miss having fast, throwaway OSes on that server for experiments (sometimes its nice to have pets).