lxd

LXD is Canonical's system container and VM manager. Unlike Docker, which runs single-process application containers, LXD runs full Linux system containers that behave like lightweight VMs. The same tool also manages real KVM virtual machines through the same API. Apt-installable on Ubuntu, available everywhere else through snaps.

Day-to-day, LXD is solid. Profile-based configuration, storage pools (ZFS, LVM, btrfs, dir), software-defined networking via OVN, snapshots, and live migration. The CLI is consistent and the REST API is well-documented. Clustering is built in for multi-host setups.

Solo developers and homelabs run LXD without thinking about it. Teams should pause: in 2023 Canonical relicensed LXD to AGPL-3.0 and pulled it under a contributor license agreement, which prompted the original maintainers to fork the project as Incus under the Linux Containers umbrella. Incus is Apache 2.0, accepts external contributions on equal terms, and tracks LXD feature-for-feature.

The catch is the governance, not the code. If you are picking a system container manager in 2026, look at Incus first. LXD still works fine, but the license posture and the loss of the original maintainer team are reasons most production deployments are migrating off it.