June 25, 2026
Cluster breakup goes public
Migrating from Proxmox to NixOS and Incus
One home lab owner ditched the old dashboard, and the comments instantly turned into a civil war
TLDR: A homelab owner shut down his old Proxmox setup and rebuilt everything on NixOS and Incus because it’s easier to recreate and less likely to turn into a mystery mess. Commenters split fast: some praised Incus as super reliable, while others insisted Proxmox is being unfairly dragged.
A home tech tinkerer announced he has finally broken up with Proxmox—the popular software many people use to run lots of mini-computers and virtual machines—and moved everything to NixOS plus Incus, a setup he says is easier to rebuild exactly the same every time. His big selling point? No more mystery fixes, no more forgotten button-clicks, and no more late-night “what on earth did past me do?” panic after a bad update. The crowd absolutely had thoughts.
Some readers were ready to elope on the spot. One person said Incus has been “rock solid” in production for nearly a year, which is basically the nerd version of a five-star marriage review. Another chimed in to say they’re tempted too, but maybe with IncusOS so they don’t have to babysit the main machine themselves.
But the real drama came from the Proxmox defenders, who did not appreciate the claim that it’s basically a point-and-click toy. One commenter fired back with a spicy “Uhh, whut?”, arguing you can absolutely run it from command lines and config files, thank you very much. Another flexed even harder: NixOS didn’t replace Proxmox for them—it made Proxmox stronger, to the point where they never touch the web panel at all.
And then came the practical skeptic energy: okay, cool story, but can this new setup still let me spin up a random Windows machine for the weekend? That comment captured the vibe perfectly. Beneath the philosophical battle over tidy, repeatable setups versus familiar tools, the community’s real question was simple: is this actually better, or just a cleaner-looking obsession?
Key Points
- •The author says they decommissioned a Proxmox homelab cluster and migrated all workloads to NixOS with Incus.
- •The article describes a shift toward Nix after repeated NVIDIA driver problems on Pop!_OS and a GRUB boot loop caused by imperative system changes.
- •A central argument in the article is that declarative configuration reduces state drift compared with GUI-driven or imperative administration.
- •The author gives an HP EliteDesk network-card issue as an example of a hardware workaround now preserved in NixOS as a documented systemd service.
- •The article says NixOS allows an Intel NUC to run Kodi on the host while Incus hosts services in the background, avoiding the GPU passthrough trade-off described for Proxmox.