I have been having lots of annoying issues with incus and running on alpine. It would seem that most of the devs and the project are systemd and glibc specific (at least for testing, it KIND of runs, but its VERY wonky in reporting, unstable etc).
Which os is the best for security / compatibility with incus as a base os? Alma, Debian, Suse, etc? I need something thats stable and mainlined. I like alpine for my servers because its EASY to upgrade in place, whereas others are no so easy.
Redhat upgrades are notorious, I despise ubuntu, debian is kind of borering, but I haven’t done in place upgrades, how about the incus dedicated os?
Debian and Ubuntu are both very common. I use Debian and have not had any of the issues that you describe.
In the near future there will be an Incus OS specifically designed for running Incus on bare metal. It is based on Debian and uses systemd. My recommendation is to use Debian 12 for now and move over to Incus OS when it is ready.
You don’t say why you despise Ubuntu, but I recommend it as an incus platform.
The main advantage is that it integrates ZFS fully, with binary modules supplied (no dkms compilation required)
In-place upgrades from one LTS version to another have never been a problem for me. I do recommend apt purge snapd; apt-mark hold snapd though.
I also suggest you keep your incus ZFS storage in its own partition. At very worst, you can do a complete re-install of the OS and incus (even a different OS), followed by incus admin recover, and you’ll keep all your existing containers/VMs.