Distrobox is underappreciated as hell, no surprise that vanillaOS, and alikes are getting so popular right now.
I have a laptop with opensuse, great, great distro, performance is awesome, very stable and resilient, running the latest KDE, for most apps, I have flatpak in user mode, so I don’t write anything in my root directory, nothing runs as sudo.
But opensuse has a fatal flaw, it’s not arch linux, software availability is not exceptional, sometimes you miss a thing, or the software you relie on, doesn’t work, or it’s broken because it won’t support suse properly. That’s where distrobox comes in, using it you can create a container distro and have you software in there, hell, you could even make multiple containers for different uses, like a development container with vs code, and the gazillion libraries and dev packages inside without having to worry about bloating the main system, or a gaming container with lutris, wine, all it’s 32 bit libraries and dependencies without mixing them with the host system, like I do, or perhaps you can have a container with davinci resolve, or other program that still has a windows-like installer that either works, or breaks your entire system every time you try it on a new distro, possibilities and almost endless! And even better, no performance penalty!
The coolest thing about distrobox is for sure the container-userland integration, for example, if your app inside distrobox is able to use xdg desktop portal, you can do cool stuff like screen capture, file picking, and actually having the right theming(if you have a copy of your theme under your home of course), all with the Host’s portal! Even fonts sync with the host!
Sadly, distrobox is not flowless, you can’t really use it with things that depend on deeper system integration, for example, waydroid, which needs to have a service running as root on the kernel for it to actually work, so using it on distros like opensuse or your average independent Linux based operating system, [insert cool, or clever word]OS that you and other 6 people on the entire globe love (for some reason) remains impossible without proper support.
I wouldn’t call a project with over 6k upvotes (and counting) on Github underappreciated. Perhaps what you tried to convey is that -surprisingly enough- the community is split on how they view Distrobox within the grand scheme of things. I simply can’t fathom anyone to be unappreciative of what it achieves and how. However, there are those that might regard it as one of the rising stars that represent a big upcoming change that might even be -in their eyes- an existential threat to Linux. They fear that containers, immutable distros and all of that ‘mumbo jumbo’ will threaten the freedom in which they interact with their systems. They don’t see them as (potential) solutions to long-held problems, but instead they are viewed as invasive to Linux and an attempt to <insert proprietary OS>-ify Linux and thus as an assault to Linux’ uniquely strong qualities. I wonder if if this might be somehow philosophically rooted in how some people lean towards conservatism, while others lean towards progressivism instead.
But yeah, Distrobox is excellent.
I’m just learning about distrobox.
In the past year or so, literally everybody and their mother, decided to join the immutable bandwagon that has been going strong for quite some time. About half of these rely on Distrobox (or very similar solutions) to ensure the desired feature set functions properly. Unsurprisingly, it has also been featured on conferences.
Furthermore, Distrobox itself has been featured in some capacity in a lot of different Linux-related news outlets. And I haven’t even mentioned how many times Linux content creators on YouTube have featured it in their videos.
It would be awesome if people that are still bereft of the features that are provided through Distrobox would somehow get to learn about it. Today has been ‘your awakening’, so feel free to spread the good word and perhaps others will follow suit.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=eM1p47tow4o
https://piped.video/watch?v=_RzARte80SQ
https://piped.video/watch?v=FhW-3PPldAg
https://piped.video/watch?v=Sj064D9ZUl8
https://piped.video/watch?v=wmRiZQ9IZfc
https://piped.video/watch?v=eh-a1W5IJbA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
[insert cool, or clever word]OS
I feel personally attacked
Just a honest question: if I install Thunderbird using distrobox, can I define it as my default browser? If I click in a mailto link will it work?
Yes. Distrobox can create
.desktopfiles, making any program look “installed” to the DE, which handles default programs.Thank you for confirming!
I can’t answer your question but Thunderbird just officially took over the flatpak on flathub.
Maybe a good alternative?
I’m using flatpak extensively but I’m looking for faster start-up times. Anyway, thanks for the suggestion.
Yes, you should be able to
Thank you for confirming!
Have you checked out the recently added distrobox-assemble feature?
You can define the container (or multiple containers) and what software to add (and very soon what apps and bins to export to the host) in a single config file declaratively.
It’s the killer app for me to live alongside my Silverblue install!
Just don’t forget to run
distrobox-exportfrom inside the container after your install something,distrobox-export --appfor apps, anddistrobox-export --binwith the absolute path of your binary from inside the container ex:/bin/neofetchYeah, but what if the app is more complicated, like it needs to run in a conda container and may have extra flags passed to it? (I’m double dipping in the container sauce for hacking mods to AI stuff)
You can modify the .desktop file or the local binary genereted on the host and pass those those to it, you can also do it manually, locations are
~/.local/binand~/.local/share/applications
“flowless”? Excuse me, of course it doesn’t flow like water!
