incus application for managing containers and VMs in one CLI

[Venefilyn]

This was an ask I saw in the Universal Blue Discord and since there wasn't any topics in Cockpit about it I figured I should create it for documentation purposes in case anyone ever takes this up.

Creating an application one can follow the https://github.com/cockpit-project/starter-kit and add features over time. Cockpit team will be available to help with questions etc. in the Discussions section or in Matrix as always.

To quote @bketelsen and @m2Giles:

because it's [Incus] a swiss army knife for containers and virtualization. it does containers and vms using the same toolset. Very easy to use, very powerful.

and

System Containers and VMs with a single interface.

Often when working on projects I don't need a full VM but still need a system with an actual init. Podman can be cludged to using systemd/openrc but it's not ideal.

Then when transitioning to a VM for testing it's more or less having the same command with --vm at the end.

See:
https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/

[jelly]

There is some prior work here, lxd-ui for example.