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?
Use Incus on Nixos, runs my Blocky local DNS server i pass into tailscale for specifically my domain and subdomains. Doesnt give me any trouble
I didn’t follow the instructions carefully enough and the installer bricked a motherboard by incorrectly enrolling secure boot keys. The board doesn’t have dual bios or a way to flash without POST, the SPI has to be removed, flashed, and resoldered, which surprised me that gigabyte would not have a recovery plan in place across all their boards but that’s my fault for not checking what I bought.
TLDR: read the instructions in their guide carefully. You can brick a board with this.
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.
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 using Incus for awhile now, but TIL there’s an IncusOS.
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.
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.
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.
