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Comment by genshii | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Can Incus do regular vms too, or only LXCs? I think I looked at it before but wrote it off because I still have some workloads that have to be in VMs.

Yes, it can do both. The image server will build for both options if possible, so you have to specify “—vm” on the command line creating the domain.

That's awesome, thanks for the nudge. I reinstalled one of my proxmox servers so that I can try Incus out and see if I like it.

It looks like it may handle networking (via ovn) a bit better than what I have now

It can do VMs, "system containers" like LXC and Docker/OCI-compatible application containers.

There was a project to implement a dockcer-compose compatible "incus-compose" but unfortunately, it looks dead, right now.

You can even set up a kubernetes cluster entirely composed of containers: https://github.com/lxc/cluster-api-provider-incus

Incus is more comparable to LXD than proxmox. IncusOS is different though.

LXD containers also are unprivileged by default.

You might be mixing up LXC and LXD

Even I that worked for a long while with this tech would mix them up time and again, I think it's understandable.

From Incus main page:

> The Incus project was created by Aleksa Sarai as a community driven alternative to Canonical's LXD. Today, it's led and maintained by many of the same people that once created LXD.

Thé confusion si real

No, LXD’s LXCs. I use it and it’s good.

The UID mappings are correctly setup in Ubuntu so the containers run non-privileged by default.

I hear Incus, a fork of LXD, is better. It’s used in truenas.

Incus is specifically an LXD fork.

Incus was an LXD fork in the very beginning but it's evolved a lot since then. Incus is far superior than LXD in number of ways

Interesting. Is there anything else that is better than proxmox? Like performance etc?

I like harvester by suse

Besides VMs and LXC/Proxmox-style containers, it can also run docker containers out of the box.

Profiles are really great. It's like cloud-init on steroids

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