LXD is really great software. The majority of the contributions already come from canonical, so I doubt this will make much difference in the trajectory of the project.

I will say that I prefer running LXD on NixOS hosts where it isn't packaged as a snap. Hopefully canonical doesn't somehow break that.

Same, though it seems this acquisition is mainly about snaps, so we'll see.

I wish Nix would package Kata, a hybrid of containers and VMs. I would migrate to that from LXD.

https://katacontainers.io/

It does have Firecracker and Ignite though, which I haven't tested but probably also suffice.

https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/

https://github.com/weaveworks/ignite