My shop went from VMware to OpenShift around the time I transitioned from systems to whatever it is I do now. In my private life I've used kvm since it was first rolled out, but over the last few years have redeployed all my home services to docker. I did try lxc for a while, and think it could replace kvm for lab work. On the other hand, lxd never seemed worth the effort: especially with its snapd dependency. Podman seems like a good alternative to docker, but I'm not sure migrating to it would be worth the effort as long as docker sticks around.
I use LXD these days and I love it. It's easy enough to deploy without knowing too much internal details. Its CLI is also intuitive and well designed. It's true that LXD doesn't support installation outside snap. However, many distros like Alpine, Arch and Gentoo support its installation on bare metal from their software repos.
