“microvms” are real vms but the hypervisor and vm (guest kernel) shed most of the hardware / device emulation, support, and discovery which makes traditional VMs look / feel like real computers, as well as most guest interactions. This gives them extremely low overhead.

Firecracker is designed to start a VM in under 125ms and 5MB. Netbsd advertises that you can direct-boot a MICROVM kernel configuration in under 10ms.

There are many devs that have little to no experience of Linux, like the hundreds of thousands of .Net and Java CRUD devs in enterprise companies using Windows.

There is a need for a Docker desktop like GUI for this market.

Your example is not complete, you have to show how it will run claude/codex, you have to do extra things to install run and mount folders there, this one does that with less config, also with this agents can run docker, lxd doesn't allow you to do that

It’s real VMs, firecracker style.

An Ubuntu Server VM, like the ones started by Incus, use at least 512 MB of RAM per instance. If you spawn 10 sandbox VMs, you already pay 5 GB RAM just to sit there idle. You also pay a CPU cost, you have 10 kernels managing stuff, but arguably it doesn't matter that much given CPU core counts.

I use something in between - a single Ubuntu VM, into which I spawn multiple Incus LXC containers for the agents. The containers only use 50 MB or so per instance (separate systemd, ...). This way I pay the VM RAM tax only once, and the agents are still contained inside the VM if they manage to escape the LXC containers.

That's a full VM. Microvms are much smaller and they start up very very fast. In miliseconds.

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