Interesting. I recommend Incus over other hypervisor-oriented OS distributions (Proxmox, etc.), for many reasons, but one minor reason is that you can install it on Debian or Arch or whatever Linux you like. It's a comprehensive management layer for VMs and Linux containers, with good CLI, web UI, cloning/moving/copying/migrating etc., but... why does that need to be an OS?
However, I'm confident that if that is what you want, this is probably fantastic — Incus, including the old LXD (which was mainly built by the same core developers, until Canonical behaved in ways they didn't like, and they hard-forked LXD to create Incus) has been one of my favorite open-source projects for several years.
Fantastic software, steady stream of reliable releases, helpful community... Incus is great.
It doesn't. You can still run Incus on other platforms of choice.
Sample size 1 here, but a big advantage of the 'full-stack' approach is things like network config, storage management, boot safety etc all work out of the box and you then get a single API (and nice client) for the whole machine. I get the benefits of cloud infra, like not having to care (too much) about sysadmin, from some hardware sitting in the corner.
Previously I would still need to be maintaining that base layer too. That still makes sense for some environments, but particularly for home I just want my lights and music to work, and be able to play.
Yeah, I already maintain that base layer, and like being able to just run it on Debian, like I said. But, one of the awesome things about Incus is how easy it is to move instances around the LAN (or WAN, I suppose). I don't need super rigorous failovers for most things running at home, but just because it's so easy, I typically always do have a recent copy of every container I run (blogs, home automation servers, various web apps, etc) on a different machine, so when one machine goes down it's super easy to just start the equivalent instance on the other machine.
I run instances I need to interact with (e.g., do development in containers via SSH and remote-editors, with occasional Remote Desktop) on my very-fast Linux workstation — that also does other stuff like local development, web browsing, etc., but most instances that don't need power run on my old 56-core Xeon enterprise server (used, they are roughly as cheap as a Mac Mini).
Incus makes it super easy to move instances around, and from a skim of the announcement it looks like you could just put Incus OS on some machine you have lying around and drop it into an existing config like that with minimal effort.
I look forward to trying it out, even if my "main" Incus will probably remain on my actual manually-curated Linux desktop.
However, I'm confident that if that is what you want, this is probably fantastic — Incus, including the old LXD (which was mainly built by the same core developers, until Canonical behaved in ways they didn't like, and they hard-forked LXD to create Incus) has been one of my favorite open-source projects for several years.
Fantastic software, steady stream of reliable releases, helpful community... Incus is great.