[laxis96]

Please note that Docker and LXC (and LXD by extension) are essentially the same technology packaged differently, with different yet overlapping use cases; in fact, early Docker Engine was based on LXC before they switched to containerd.

Therefore I don't think there is anything that can run on LXC/LXD but not on Docker (and vice versa); it's more a matter of preference, whether you want a long-lived persistent virtual system (LXC/LXD) or ephemeral single-application containers with optional persistence (Docker).

Still, nothing stops you from using LXC/LXD for ephemeral containers and Docker for long-lived systems, but you'd be using the non-optimal tool.

[deviantintegral]

This summarizes it well. Sometimes you run into apps that don’t ship Docker containers because they expect to not be behind a reverse proxy. For example, while there are third party Docker containers for the Unifi controller, they only support using their apt repos. The controller expects to be able to send low-level discovery packets and not just HTTP. Lxd makes that really easy.

Also, from a development standpoint sometimes a long-lived container environment is easier. I run zigbee2mqtt inside of lxd because if I want to try a PR, it’s `git checkout … && npm ci` and not building a whole container each time.

For the home NAS and server case, I’ve been really happy with Ubuntu server with zfs + lxd + docker. And, a lxd VM for Home Assistant OS. Basically, the right tool for each job and no worries trying to force software into an environment their developers don’t expect.