Introduction After a bit over a year of hard work, the development team is very excited to announce general availability of IncusOS! IncusOS is a modern immutable OS image that’s specifically designed to run Incus. It provides atomic updates through an A/B update mechanism using distinct partitions and it enforces boot security through UEFI Secure Boot and a TPM 2.0 module. Under the hood, it’s built on a minimal Debian 13 base, using the Zabbly builds of both the Linux kernel, ZFS and Inc...
Though perhaps it is important to make the distinction clear:
Incus is the software that supports running OCI and LXC containers, and VMs. It is the functional equivalent to the Proxmox virtualisation suite, storage, network, image and container management and also the management web UI.
IncusOS tries to support this program for your bare-metal servers by providing an immutable OS underneath which hosts Incus but cannot be reached via shell access at all. It intends to form a super locked-down base from which to use Incus, but which also comes with preinstalled goodies such as ceph, linstore, zfs, and some service setups (afaik).
So the closest comparison to Proxmox currently is a simple Incus installation on a Debian bare-metal host. IncusOS I would argue is actually moving further away from that comparison with its locked down base and immutable nature.
In a way the project reminds me much more of TalosOS which creates a similarly locked down base environment to work with Kubernetes on top.
Yes, sorry. I meant incus, not incus os.
No worries, mostly thought I’d point it out to others reading who might be a little confused by the close naming scheme and don’t know exactly what tool provides which functions.
(And since I love incus but think for most people atm IncusOS is not the right choice)
Yes, that makes it more comparable to MicroOS, which does the same with podman.
MicroOS is based on a more mainstream system but it’s still immutable with transactional updates.
What I’m trying to ask is if the project’s goal / development is being more MicroOS or more Proxmox Linux? & whether it tries be a replacement or a different workflow all together?
I see that there’s a Migration Manager in beta as an install option to switch from vmware ESXi, so I wonder if other OS-level hypervisors are in the roadmap.