I discovered Incus and IncusOS recently, and they seem like a very cool foundation for a self-hosted setup.
I’m thinking of using them with incus-compose to declare my setup.
Does anybody use them? I’d love to get some feedback. Are they stable and polished yet, or are there still a lot of sharp edges?
They mention “designed for modern systems” on their website. Are there any issues running it on a roughly 10-year-old laptop?
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Did consider it about a year ago but seemed too early at the time compared to the stability of Proxmox. It dles however look like it has come quite far. Will add it to my to-checkout-list 😊
I use Incus on Debian 13. Debian 13 packages Incus, and that version only does security updates and focuses on stability. To be clear, Debian’s model is to not do bugfixes or feature updates, to prevent any update from being breaking in any way. This ensures users can automatically get security updates.
I get it from zabbly’s repos: https://github.com/zabbly/incus , in order to get newer versions of Incus, and to get, however. There is a risk of breaking updates but I’ll live and fixing the occasional thing on my one server is okay. The Zabbly incus repos also come with the UI, although the UI is just a static site you can put in the right spot. I like that design, because it means that only the API can do anything, which lessens the attack surface.
I also use Incus personally on my laptop on Arch Linux. It’s nice to have the same UI/UX for vm management, and being able to download the premade images from their docker like repository is pretty nice as well.
Running Incus on a headless Debian 13 host using a Ryzen 2700 CPU with an uptime of at least 200 days, no issues. Really like the ability to seamlessly pass through a GPU on any container running the same kernel. Used to run ESXi, never looking back.
Incus somewhat recently added support for gpu acceleration for VM’s via virtualgl/virgl: https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/news/#gpu-sharing-for-virtual-machines-through-drm-native-context
This does only support OpenGL, but it’s way, way better than no hardware accel for many things.
In addition to that, there is potential of windows virtual machines getting support for OpenGL hardware acceleration, as well: https://github.com/virtio-win/kvm-guest-drivers-windows/pull/943 . Unfortunately that looks like it stalled. I have seen other projects, like this or this, but even if people get something working, one big barrier is the drivers have to be signed (by Microsoft) before they can easily be included into Windows.
I’ve been using Incus for awhile now, but TIL there’s an IncusOS.
I want to upgrade to it from Proxmox when I eventually get a new processor. It seems perfect for my use case; proxmox is far too complex for what little I do with it.
I’ve used Incus, but not incusos for over two years now. Works well.
Stability is great, flexibility to do what I need is also great.
Also there are quite a few options for deployment, I use ansible.
I’ve been running IncusOS on a 10 year old Dell Inspiron 22-3263 with no issues for around a year now. The install process was straightforward, even for this older hardware. Administration is via an intuitive web GUI, and if you’ve ever used Ubuntu Micro Cloud, you’d already be quite familiar with the interface, as Incus is a fork of that, IIRC.
Is incus-compose a part of the base system, or an add-on? How does it work on IncusOS if it’s a command-line tool and there’s neither a remote nor a local shell, only a web API? Does it provide a built-in way to automate container updates?
Is incus-compose a part of the base system, or an add-on
it’s a program you install on your client machine. It just connects to the Incus API (probably using the Incus cli).
How does it work on IncusOS if it’s a command-line tool and there’s neither a remote nor a local shell, only a web API?
The Incus cli connects to the API.
Does it provide a built-in way to automate container updates
For the most part, Incus containers are system containers, similar to lightweight virtual machines. They run a full distro, including systemd and all that. For keeping those updating, you would want to use the auto update methods that Linux distros provide.
There are also OCI containers that Incus can run, but I don’t think there is any form of auto update for those. You might be better off just running docker/podman/kubes in a VM for that.
Haven’t heard about it. I probably should give it a try.
Sounds neat but I would be worried about the no shell stuff, I run my things headless for the most part and like SSH and occasionally VNC access.
Talking about incus. Don’t know incusos.
It has a CLI (console) which can be used to connect to VMs and containers among many other things. The incus web UI has a shell and remote desktop function. And of course you are allowed to ssh into the VMs directly too.
Incus is designed to be a Hypervisor (e.g. like Proxmox / VMware). So it is fully intended to not be able to fuck around on the host system as you are supposed to create VMs and containers in which you can do that.
No, you can install Incus on any linux distro. I use it on a Debian server.
It’s IncusOS that is immutable.
But proxmox is actually just a set of packages on top of debian, and proxmox is not immutable either. You aren’s supposed to tinker with the host, but if you are doing things like jailbreaking consuner gpu’s to unlock the server gpu only features, then it becomes nice to have that option.
