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(Famous last words of a distrohopper)
Yeah, back in 2022 I installed distrobox on Fedora and was like yeah I’m not switching. Then, I switched to Arch for the AUR. I was scared cus of issues I had on Manjaro, but vanilla Arch is better.
What is distrobox?
It’s essentially running a linux container on top of your own system. Which means you can use the toolkit of those distros ( for example the package manager of that system) to install apps from their repos, even gui apps. But those containers also has access to your original filesystem so be careful how you use them. Might want to watch Brodie’s video on it.
How does Distrobox compare to VanillaOS?
Thank you for sharing this! It was just the thing I needed to get a project setup. Toolbox couldn’t pull the version of Fedora I needed to use for whatever reason, but Distrobox works great and has a much wider selection of distributions.
I Wish I would have discovered it before. I think it’s very useful when you want to install proprietary software like Matlab or Vivado. With distrobox you avoid to bloat your system and when you want to remove them you simply remove the container
100%
To add to this, you can even specify a home folder for the distrobox so it doesn’t even clutter your home folder. Really neat
Wow I did not realize that! It’s explained in the docs?
Yes, in the Useful Tips section. Lots of other cool notes there:
https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_tips.md
Have fun!
I use Distrobox with my NixOS machine for when I need AppImage support (or some random binary that isn’t equipped for Nix’s weird ass directory layout) and it’s amazing! Pretty much native speed, and when I’m done with it I can just wipe it out. Perfect!
Distrobox is great and I also used on Fedora Silverblue before switching to NixOS (with similar use cases).
For running AppImages there’s also appimage-run on NixOS. https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Appimage
I’m aware, but the appimage I run (Slippi Launcher) will run other appimages, and appimage-run can’t handle that, since it extracts the appimage, then runs the contents, but it won’t automatically do that for other appimages that are run.
Which is why I used a Distrobox and it was awesome, worked like a charm. I used Arch previously, and I just made an Arch distrobox and it worked perfectly.
i couldn’t figure out where the binaries for their systems are kept and that’s really the one thing keeping me from having a great time with distrobox
Distrobox uses podman/docker under the hood. Each distro should have a corresponding OCI image.
I was using podman for the first time. It was kind of on me for that.
Brodie had a video on it, might want to check it out.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=FhW-3PPldAg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Appreciated, thank you.
Is this gnome?
looks like it yeah - i had a similar setup a while back.
Cross-post that desktop to !unixporn
Stinky proprietary os
Why would you need multiple distros at the same time?
Can run yourmain distro as a stable one, but have an unstable or testing version in a Distrobox container sout does not mess your main install.
If you have non Arch distro, you could run Arch in Distrobox and get to use all the AUR packages.
One use case I had was I wanted to use STM32 Cube IDE, but it has a dependency on python 2.7 I think it was. I had some trouble installing it on my main OS, but I was able to get it to work on Ubuntu 22.04 running in a Distrobox.
