Incus Debian updates

Last month, Incus 7.0 LTS was released. 🎉 I figured this would be a good excuse to give an update about the state of Incus in Debian.

Incus 7.0 LTS available in trixie-backports

As planned, Incus 7.0 was uploaded to unstable a couple of days after the upstream release and it is expected that forky will ship with a 7.0.x LTS version of Incus. There’s a lot of new features, including native support for running OCI (ie, docker) application containers. It’s pretty cool!

Somewhat unplanned, I also worked on getting the 7.0 LTS series backported to trixie. After receiving a request from another Debian Developer, I determined it would require the fairly mechanical work of backporting 36 other Go libraries and the Go 1.26 compiler to trixie before Incus 7.0 LTS could be backported. That work was completed over a couple of weeks (thanks to Micha Lenk for prompt reviews of packages uploaded to backports-NEW!), and at the end of May Incus 7.0 became available in trixie-backports.

During the forky development cycle, new 7.0 LTS releases will be backported for Incus after they migrate to testing. After forky’s release, backports will continue to be made for security-related fixes.

Conclusion of support for bookworm-backports

On June 10th, security support for the remainder of bookworm’s life cycle will be handed over to the LTS team. As such, I will also be terminating my (personal) support for updating the backported version of Incus 6.0 LTS for bookworm because the only updates to Incus in trixie should be security-releated. If you’re still on bookworm, consider this an opportunity to consider upgrading to trixie in the near future.

popcon status

Debian runs an op-in popularity contest (popcon) service that reports statistics about installed packages. While it’s not statistically rigorous and is an under-count of actual installed packages, it does help give some insight into general trends.

At the beginning of June 2026, the popcon graph for Incus looked like the following:

The incus-base package is the purple line in the graph. This essentially shows the actual Incus servers installed; numbers for the incus-client package are higher, but that’s because users may install just the client to interact with a remote Incus server(s). I’m interested in the actual number of Incus servers installed on Debian.

Also shown in the graph is libcowsql0, but why? There are currently two main sources of Incus packages for Debian: the LTS releases included in Debian since trixie, and packaging provided by Zabbly. The Zabbly packages include bundled versions of all dependencies, while Debian’s packages follow Policy and have their various dependencies explicitly declared. Thus, tracking libcowsql0’s popcon numbers¹ allow us to determine the approximate percentage of Incus packages installed from Debian’s packaging vs Zabbly’s.

From the raw data, there are currently 835 total reported installations of incus-base, and 475 installations of libcowsql0. That comes out to approximately 57% of Incus server installs using Debian’s packaging with the remainder relying on Zabbly’s. It will be interesting to see how this trend develops in the future.