Also it’s weird that you take issue with Proxmox but not LXD. From what I read in the Incus initial announcement, what Canonical did with LXD is barely legal and definitely against the spirit of its license. Incus is a drop in replacement. Why even bring LXD up?

Mostly because we’re on a transition period from LXD into Incus. If you grab Debian 12 today you’ll get LXD 5.0.2 LTS from their repositories that is supported both by the Debian team and the Incus team. Most online documentation and help on the subject can also be found under “LXD” more easily. Everyone should be running Incus once Debian 13 comes along with it, but until then the most common choice is LXD from Debian 12 repositories. I was never, and will never suggest anyone to install/run LXD from Canonical.

It’s really the “Proxmox is fake open source” discourse I take issue with. I think it would be more helpful if you said “and you get all security updates for free with Incus, unlike Proxmox.” It’s a clear, factual message, devoid of a value judgement. People don’t like to be told what to think.

I won’t say I don’t get your point, I get it, I kinda pushed it a bit there and you’re right. Either way what stops Proxmox from doing the same thing BCM/ESXi did now? We’re talking about a for profit company and the alternative Incus sits behind the Linux Containers initiative that is effectively funded by multiple parties.

And, as far as micro to small installations go, TrueNAS is another alternative that plays well with open source (AFAIK). Unlikely to be used specifically for VMs or containers, but it’s a popular choice for home servers for a reason.

Yes, TrueNAS can be interesting for a lot of people and they also seem to want to move into the container use-case with TrueNAS Scale but that one is still more broken than useful.