danofsteel32 parent
Incus is great when developing ansible playbooks. The main benefit for me over docker/podman is systemd works out of the box in incus containers.
I have never actually tested it, but my understanding is that systemd also works out of the box inside of podman containers: https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-run.1.html#...
What makes it better than Vagrant for this use-case?
Doesn't Vagrant spin up full VMs? Incus/LXD/LXC is about system containers. So like Docker, but with a full distro including init system running inside the container. They are much faster to spin up and have the best resource sharing possible.
Vagrant is not the right comparison against Incus for this use case. Vagrant is used to spin up VM or system container instances that are configured for software development and testing. But vagrant doesn't create those VMs or containers by itself. Instead, it depends on virtualization/container providers like VMware, Virtualbox, libvirt or lxc. In fact, you could create a provider plugin for vagrant to use Incus as its container/VM back end. (I couldn't find any, though.)
https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/blob/v2.4.7/LICENSE for one thing