Incus

I forgot the reason. License was one thing but it was mostly because of LXD being tied to Ubuntu. I no longer remember where I read this.

TL;DR: It’s like a VM but it’s not!

I am a Windows user for a long time. Well, not that long. I have used Windows since Windows 95. And with that comes the necessary work of avoiding malwares getting into my main box.

I used to play with sandboxie Plus (it was once called just Sandboxie and it was not free) to sandbox programs and applications I do not trust. I also use Sandboxie for certain games and tools and I enjoyed having almost full control of the software. Not to mention, it doesn’t mess up with my user data and system configurations. If I needed something to be ran once, Sandboxie is my go to tool.

But it wasn’t perfect since some applications doesn’t run especially if they have anti-VM built in.

When I started using Linux, the sandboxing equivalent that I found was ROOT:firejail.adoc. However, I didn’t fully understand its full potential.

Then I found out about linux containers. And fell inlove that linux containers can actually run games with very little overhead!

Incus also worked as a clean alternative for virtual machines since it’s light and it’s possible to create a new one easily. A big plus when I write code with a lot of system changes like database servers.

Now, my main usage for Incus is containerization of apps because I don’t wanna mess up my system that much (it was a nightmare to maintain WINE and windows). By mess, I mean I don’t want to clean up files I keep forgetting to delete. Oftentimes, work overlaps on my personal computer. So, supposed work files that should not be part of my personal files are included. This includes software development environment as well.

With Incus containers, I keep my system as is. I can separate my concerns easily and not worry about it.