Migrating from Proxmox to NixOS and Incus

I'm also considering migrating from Proxmox to Incus, but I'd look into IncusOS rather than having to manage the host OS myself.

NixOS has transformed my use of Proxmox. I configure, build, and deploy everything from my nix workstation. I don't need to use the PVE gui at all. Proxmox is just a target, and I've abstracted things enough to where I can deploy the same machines to libvirt on a local machine too. Why would I need to let my agent into my PVE box? I haven't looked at incus, but if I wanted to run the full stack declaratively, nixos and LLMs are so powerful now that I would probably just say to run libvirt and ZFS on nixos natively.

Sounds like writer has builders syndrome.

>There is a deeper philosophical difference too. Systems like Proxmox or TrueNAS are designed as appliances. You aren’t supposed to run arbitrary commands on the host; installing packages or tweaking config files is discouraged because you might break the middleware or lose changes on upgrade. You are effectively locked out of your own hardware’s full potential. With NixOS, the host is fully mine. I can mess with it—installing Kodi, tweaking network drivers, running local LLMs—without fear. Because the state is declarative, it is 100% obvious and reproducible. I can break the host configuration and recover to a working state in seconds, even if the machine is running essential services."

Total nonsense. The project advises caution about modifying the host because you might conflict with their package versions or lose changes on upgrade, but that's not being "locked out," that's just a maintenance consideration. The entire point of Proxmox is that you spin up VMs and containers where you do whatever you please with full isolation which is arguably more flexible than running everything on bare metal NixOS, not less.

The whole article is a guy who replaced a working hypervisor with a more complicated stack that does the same thing, had AI write it for him, and wrote a blog post about how superior it is.

This seems very cool and I will probably try it, but I think I’m missing something. I run Proxmox so that I can have multiple VMs running on my NUC. This doesn’t really solve that right? I cant spin up a windows 11 vm one weekend for a random experiment.

Incus is roughly a frontend for qemu, so you can launch an empty VM and use the ISO to install the OS. You don't have to use a preconfigured base image.