[veidr]

Exactly, we migrated to LXD from Proxmox for stateful containers for various servers (DNS, Zulip, Mastodon) as well as user desktops (e.g. Ubuntu Desktop, Fedora, etc).

LXD is nice because it has a nice management layer. It is really easy to migrate an instance (container or VM) and its state from one physical machine to another on the LAN, even if you don't want to bother with setting up an actual cluster.

[MrPowerGamerBR]

I think that LXD as a Proxmox alternative is a very underrated idea to be honest.

Don't get me wrong, Proxmox is a pretty good piece of software, but if your workload isn't tailored to VMs + you have private links between your clusters + you have shared storage, you end up adding way too much complexity to your stack even tho you aren't using the real useful features that Proxmox provides.

So if you are in the "I just want to run my services" crowd, an Ubuntu Server (or any other distro, really) running Docker on baremetal + LXD for anything that can't run on Docker is way simpler to manage. Especially because running Docker on Proxmox is not fun (too cumbersome to run it within a LXC container + ZFS, running a big fat VM with Docker defeats the point since you can't backup individual containers with Proxmox anymore, and running Docker on the hypervisor is a big no-no)

At the end of the day, nothing in Proxmox has a special magic sauce that makes it tick, and sometimes that complexity may be super cumbersome when you just want to run some dang Docker containers for your swifty new app. https://mrpowergamerbr.com/us/blog/2022-11-20-proxmox-isnt-f...

[laxis96]

Please note that Docker and LXC (and LXD by extension) are essentially the same technology packaged differently, with different yet overlapping use cases; in fact, early Docker Engine was based on LXC before they switched to containerd.

Therefore I don't think there is anything that can run on LXC/LXD but not on Docker (and vice versa); it's more a matter of preference, whether you want a long-lived persistent virtual system (LXC/LXD) or ephemeral single-application containers with optional persistence (Docker).

Still, nothing stops you from using LXC/LXD for ephemeral containers and Docker for long-lived systems, but you'd be using the non-optimal tool.

[deviantintegral]

This summarizes it well. Sometimes you run into apps that don’t ship Docker containers because they expect to not be behind a reverse proxy. For example, while there are third party Docker containers for the Unifi controller, they only support using their apt repos. The controller expects to be able to send low-level discovery packets and not just HTTP. Lxd makes that really easy.

Also, from a development standpoint sometimes a long-lived container environment is easier. I run zigbee2mqtt inside of lxd because if I want to try a PR, it’s `git checkout … && npm ci` and not building a whole container each time.

For the home NAS and server case, I’ve been really happy with Ubuntu server with zfs + lxd + docker. And, a lxd VM for Home Assistant OS. Basically, the right tool for each job and no worries trying to force software into an environment their developers don’t expect.