LXD
Container hypervisor in Developer tools
Lightweight Linux system containers that run a full OS environment on little RAM. Critics say the latest version comes mainly via snap and networking needs setup.
Lightweight Linux system containers that run a full OS environment on little RAM. Critics say the latest version comes mainly via snap and networking needs setup.
17 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 11
- criticize it
- 6
- approval share
- 65%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 11 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.8 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Quick install, setup and cloning
“clones an LXD container and I get all my repos and infra isolated in 5s”
Comment from 17 Sep 2026 in “HarnessTax: How Much Does the Harness Matter for Coding Agents?” “And it makes a new lxd container using my base image.”
Comment from 16 Jan 2026 in “Claude Cowork Runs Linux VM via Apple Virtualization Framework” “2 commands to install and setup lxd”
Comment from 16 Jan 2026 in “Linux boxes via SSH: suspended when disconected” Lightweight full-system containers
“Thankfully LXD is here to serve this need: very lightweight containers for systems, where your app runs in a complete ecosystem, but very light on the ram usage.”
Comment from 2 Nov 2025 on Hacker News “LXD added some standard tooling, sort of Docker lite plus fewer restrictions in some aspects (systemd supported)”
Comment from 23 Nov 2025 in “Ubuntu LTS releases to 15 years with Legacy add-on” Sandboxing with clean isolation
“Sandboxing in a container in Linux isn't hard, if you use lxd/incus which ships with Ubuntu/Debian.”
Comment from 15 Jul 2026 in “I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets” “clones an LXD container and I get all my repos and infra isolated in 5s”
Comment from 17 Sep 2026 in “HarnessTax: How Much Does the Harness Matter for Coding Agents?”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Snap-only install for latest version
“the only downside is that in order to get the latest version of LXD installed easily you'd have to do it via snap”
Comment from 10 Jul 2026 in “Ditching Vagrant: VMs with KVM and Virsh on Debian” “LXD is only available through snap, which caused multiple downtimes in the cluster”
Comment from 14 Nov 2025 in “Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor” Networking needs careful configuration
“though it does require a bit of faffing around with the networking”
Comment from 30 Sep 2026 in “Show HN: NSL – WSL for Linux” “do not configure firewall to block non-their traffic, making the machine an open router”
Comment from 3 Apr 2026 in “What changes when you turn a Linux box into a router” Default user can escalate to root
“on a fresh install of Ubuntu Server 24+, the default user can privilege escalate to root using a few LXD commands.”
Comment from 1 Sep 2026 in “Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root” “the first user created is part of the lxd group”
Comment from 30 Aug 2026 in “Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root”
What people said
20 of the 22 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“LXD is something you can easily configure from cloud-init”
“though it does require a bit of faffing around with the networking”
“I have lxd containers already running that have everything the system needs.”
“clones an LXD container and I get all my repos and infra isolated in 5s”
“on a fresh install of Ubuntu Server 24+, the default user can privilege escalate to root using a few LXD commands.”
“supports fine-grained ACLs and user management.”
“the first user created is part of the lxd group”
“Sandboxing in a container in Linux isn't hard, if you use lxd/incus which ships with Ubuntu/Debian.”
“the only downside is that in order to get the latest version of LXD installed easily you'd have to do it via snap”
“do not configure firewall to block non-their traffic, making the machine an open router”
“lxd/lxc containers are much much underrated”
“lxd VMs are QEMU-based and very heavy.”
“2 commands to install and setup lxd”
“And it makes a new lxd container using my base image.”
“LXD added some standard tooling, sort of Docker lite plus fewer restrictions in some aspects (systemd supported)”
“including the old LXD (which was mainly built by the same core developers”
“hardcore tracking upstream, ie canonical/lxd(-ui), meaning they won't really do any changes that lxd wouldn't do”
“LXD is only available through snap, which caused multiple downtimes in the cluster”
“moved from Apache 2.0 to AGPLv3 and from not having any requirements to contributions to requiring all contributors sign a CLA”
“Thankfully LXD is here to serve this need: very lightweight containers for systems, where your app runs in a complete ecosystem, but very light on the ram usage.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.