The Homelab Debate Got Ugly Because IncusOS Hit a Nerve

A small homelab experiment turned into a surprisingly emotional fight about trust, polish, and what people actually want from their virtualization stack. The setup was simple enough: IncusOS running inside an existing Proxmox environment, with nested virtualization, a beefy host, and a curious operator poking at the edges. The reaction went well beyond IncusOS, though. People were really arguing about whether the old way of managing a hypervisor still makes sense when a newer system shows up saying, more or less, "What if the host was locked down from the start and you didn't have to babysit it?"

Security defaults are the real argument

The sharpest contrast was security. Proxmox gives you a powerful box of tools and assumes you know what you're doing. Secure Boot, LUKS, TPM support, and tighter boot-chain controls can be added, but the default install doesn't force the issue. IncusOS takes the opposite stance, treating TPM-bound disk encryption, Secure Boot, measured boot, signed certificates, and key rotation as part of the deal instead of optional extras. One person summed up the appeal as IncusOS "enforcing the security model at boot," while Proxmox "trusts the operator" to wire it up later. That sounds fine until later never comes.

For a lot of homelab users, that stings because it's true. The same people who can talk for hours about ZFS tuning, VLANs, Ceph, and firewall rules may still be running their hosts with security defaults they never revisited after install day. IncusOS doesn't flatter that habit. It removes some choices and calls it safety, which can feel refreshing or insulting depending on how much you like owning every knob. One commenter said the encryption pitch didn't matter much because they already run self-encrypting drives, which is a fair pushback. Security defaults are powerful, but they aren't magic fairy dust for every rack.

Proxmox still has the adult tools

The IncusOS excitement didn't erase the reasons Proxmox sits in so many basements, closets, and small businesses. Proxmox Backup Server came up as the big, awkward hole IncusOS has no clean answer for yet. Incremental backups, deduplication, encryption at rest and restore verification are what people actually trust when a pool gets weird and a VM has to come back from the dead. Add mature SDN, datacenter-level firewalling, Ceph integration, RBAC, live migration, HA groups, and watchdog support, and Proxmox starts looking less like old furniture and more like boring infrastructure that earned its scratches.

That's the mature side of the argument: IncusOS may feel cleaner, but Proxmox has lived through more ugly nights. One person said they had moved away from LXD toward Proxmox because it felt "more mature and complete," especially after the LXD and Incus split made the ecosystem feel messy. Another liked Incus on AlmaLinux with Terragrunt, but skipped clustering and handled resilience at the application layer. That's a third camp entirely, one that refuses to ask the hypervisor to be a cathedral. Keep hosts simple, spread workloads carefully, and let the apps do the surviving.

The update story is where IncusOS gets dangerous

IncusOS really starts to look threatening on updates. Proxmox sits on a mutable Debian base, which is part of its strength and part of its curse. You can fix, tweak, patch, and customize almost anything. You can also drift into a weird state where one node has a slightly different kernel, a package update behaves badly, or a ZFS module decides to ruin your night. IncusOS pushes an appliance model instead: an immutable host, A/B updates, rollback if the new slot fails, and nodes that should be bit-for-bit identical when they're on the same build.

That idea lands hard because homelab operators know the private shame of "I'll document it later." A read-only host with atomic updates sounds almost luxurious, with no more guessing what changed after six months of small fixes and no more handmade snowflake nodes. The tradeoff is control. Proxmox users often like the mess because the mess is theirs. IncusOS says the host should be boring, sealed, and reproducible, and that's a worldview as much as a feature list. It's also why the debate got hotter than a normal tool comparison should.

Then came the trust meltdown

The weirdest part of the thread was the suspicion. Some readers looked at the polished write-up and immediately called it advertising. One person said it read like "a sponsored blog trying to drive engagement." Another fired back that it would be a terrible sponsored post, since there were no links, no ads, and no affiliate trail. The author pushed back too, basically asking whether someone can't just experiment and share notes anymore. That's the sad little twist here: a detailed technical post now has to defend its own humanity before people will debate the content.

Then the "AI slop" accusations arrived, because of course they did. A commenter asked whether it was written with AI, and the author said they only used Grammarly to clean it up. Someone else snapped back that decent grammar doesn't automatically mean a machine wrote it. Another said it read like a white paper, which is both a criticism and accidentally a compliment. The best reply cut through the noise: "Is everything people don't like now AI slop?" That line captures the exhaustion perfectly. Online technical spaces are getting jumpy, and polish now looks suspicious.

This was never just about IncusOS

Underneath the hypervisor talk was a more human story. The author later explained they were 22, jobless, self-taught, and struggling to turn real infrastructure knowledge into full-time work without a bachelor's degree. That changed the whole texture of the thread. Suddenly the polished write-up read as someone trying to show what they know, and the marketing suspicion fell away. People started offering advice: try MSP support roles, data centers, entry-level paths, certifications, anything that gets a foot in the door. One older commenter gave the classic hiring-side view that degrees signal learning habits as well as facts.

That's why this little homelab flare-up hit harder than expected. IncusOS challenged Proxmox on defaults, updates, and host integrity, and Proxmox answered with maturity, backups, and battle-tested infrastructure. The crowd split between curiosity, skepticism, annoyance, and encouragement. The bigger lesson is messier: when someone brings a careful technical experiment into a public room, people judge the tone, the polish, the motive, and the person behind it along with the tool. IncusOS may not be a Proxmox replacement yet, but it clearly found the bruise.