That's so awesome. No more packages that I can't install because they're only available on certain distros !

Thank you for raising more awareness of this containerization technology! I say containerize everything that you can, then if you do switch distros it doesn't matter because you can take your containers with you. I switched from Arch to Debian with ease, and that's because I've set up nearly everything through flatpak and podman.

Whoever wins the app sandboxing solutions, the future is bright for distro-agnostic Linux apps. We'll probably see way less pointless distros in coming years

distrobox is freaking awesome, been using it for my dev environment, finally i don't have to worry about all those dev dependencies messing around with my host filesystem

Hey, glad to see this tool seems useful to you! I created Distrobox-Boost to help make building images and managing containers easier with Distrobox. The slow init times with Distrobox were a pain point for me too. This tool allows replacing the Distrobox builder for faster builds, and building separate image files for more flexibility. I wrote it in Rust for the performance benefits and used an MIT license to allow modifications. Key features like building from Dockerfiles, image creation without .ini files, and package updates were all functionality I needed myself. I'll be keeping this project updated as those features get implemented. Contributions are also welcome if you're interested in getting involved! Overall, this aims to solve my own issues with using Distrobox more easily and efficiently. I'm excited to see others finding it useful too. Let me know if you have any other questions!

That's pretty wild. Guess I can stop swapping out my SSDs to run different OSs 🤓

I've been using a highish-end ARM SBC for a bit and something like this would be awesome. Blending packages from the different supported ARM distros is something that could temporarily fix some problems with ARM Linux. As long as the temporary fix doesn't become long-term like most quick fixes.

Wow, now this I need to have... What an amazing toolbox this distro-thing is, and the toolbox seems OK as well, so I did a little `sudo dnf install {tool, distro}box` and got them both. Seeing that distrobox also supports emulation through Qemu, is just amazing. The whole desktop thing doesn't surprise me - adding it to the display manager was a clever idea though. Other than that, I already knew before you mentioned it, that surely you could use XNest (Runs a nested X server, i.e. an X server inside an X window) or Xephyr (headless X server, supports multiple ways of showing its display buffer, such as VNC) to start a WM or DE session, as well as setting GDM, LightDM or some other display manager to show itself on such X server. So there's a way to run the GUI login of either the containerized distro OR the host's display manager inside a window so you don't necessarily need to even logout from the host desktop. It may even be possible to run XNest or VNC client connected to Xephyr on the otherwise empty virtual desktop in fullscreen and switch between that and other virtual desktops with keybindings - depending if the window manager shows the fullscreen application only on its own virtual desktop, or if it forces a fullscreen window over everything even if you switch to another virtual desktop. P.S. Why I wasn't surprised that you could run a whole DE (or just WM) of a containerized distro is because I have that on my Nokia N900 running Maemo Linux, and I have 3 different Debian "images" on it as lzma compressed tarballs. A launcher script will mount the tarball like it was a filesystem, then it uses chroot or something similar to make the mount point the new root for that instance and execute a program or startup script from it. One of them is text-only, but the two others launch some kind of X server in a window, the smaller runs just a WM and the larger will run a full DE (LXDE I believe it was). Maemo's own DE runs windows in full-screen only (well there's the mode where you have the Maemo status bar at the top of the window with possible menubar and icon to switch to view of all running windows to switch between applications, and real fullscreen with just transparent icon to switch away from complete fullscreen. This all was pretty amazing considering the clock speed of the ARM CPU and the amount of RAM available in this smartphone from 2005 or so when Android was barely usable, but Nokia had a full handheld personal computer with a fully functional Linux OS! Had they not made so many bad decisions, finally letting a person from MS take over their smartphone section and right away put a stop to all their Linux smartphone efforts, we might not even have to suffer from Android today. Btw, the device had 32GB of internal storage, which even the most expensive Android devices had for years after. But I digress. While GUI applications on Maemo had to be ported to its own GUI system, this ad hoc distro containerization did allow running any GUI applications to be run like you would on a desktop PC, such as full desktop Firefox instead of the old version of Firefox mobile for Maemo, etc. I'm still amazed at how far ahead of their time they were :o

One very important thing, THE HOSTNAME INSIDE THE CONTAINER SHOULD BE SAME AS THE HOST, for some reason it breaks and all apps start stuttering and whole desktop freezes

Now we just need a nice GUI to wrap these features into more user friendly way.

What is the difference between these containers and a normal virtual machine? also how much storage do these containers use generally and are their lighter than virtual machines? Also another thing, when installing for example ubuntu, it will install ubuntu server or ubuntu without any desktop environment?

Can I install something like printer drivers in the container, and use printer on the host machine?

7:34 What part of the github page did you go to to find the section that shows you how to set the desktop environment? I'm on the page, and I don't see that section anywhere.

this is how I get my Archkink fix every few weeks

Imagine if we could run windows apps and tools with this one day.....

I keep getting this error on Manjaro "Error: kernel does not support overlay fs: 'overlay' is not supported over extfs at "/home/chuck/.local/share/containers/storage/overlay": backing file system is unsupported for this graph driver"

So what is the difference between distrobox and podman? I still can't understand the concept

I expect this will allow install of Ubuntu debs on Bookworm, for packages that do not have a native Debian12 release available.

Hi, this was a great video. But it bounced around a lot and although it showed a lot of things, for the lesser mortals it probably needs a slower paced video starting at a base level and working up. -- Cheers!

This is what I was waitinh for a long time, Great Software

This is amazing! The only reason I'm still Debian based is because of the apps I can't get with RHEL based distros.

I need y'all's help with something. I'm running SteamOS which is an Arch based Linux distribution, and I want to install another package type so I'm not limited to just FlatPack. With Distro Box, if I install another distro on it, like Ubuntu, will I be able to run Snap packages on my Arch distro? What I'm asking is, how would I go about using a different package type on a Arch distro?

can you make another video like this showing how to install and use a non-Arch based distro?

I'm kinda blown away, wow. ty!

by the way do not use ~/.themes/ there are xdg specified directories for themes on the home account.

Does this mean I can run ANYTHING on ANY distro??? The reason I ask that this way-- is I want to run ANDROID app for my BLINK security camera system on my COMPUTER not my phone... (or in addition to my phone).. as well as a couple other things that do NOT come in my LMDE6 distrobution. (which Iv'e come back too-- full circle- from starting in MINT and going through over a 100 other distros in trial and error)...

Does booting into a whole other operation system create the same performance issues as you can expect from virtualization? Or does this way of containerization work well for gaming? For example containerize steam/Affinity so that all games run as if they were running on linux. (had some problems with running some non-SteamDeck-verified games). This all sounds great but I wonder how far this can be effectively pushed for demanding tasks like gaming, video editing etc.

I stopped distro hopping in 2009, when I started using SUN's Virtualbox.

You are my life savior for the third time. Thanks a lot man!

thank you thank you thanks a ton. I needed this.

Tempted to use blendOS but distrobox probably will do all their job just fine

How do you keep the image clarity when you zoom in on desktop elements?

Where can I download the wallpaper at 0:04 (the one on debian)?

Great piece of software!

I believe apx, vanilla os tool which can be installed on any distro is just an easier to use distrobox

Makes me wonder if I could use this to install Snaps on a distro like Void?! 🤔

So … “experimental” software has read/write access to you non-experimental home directory? Holy cow.

This is a game changer

can you make a video about Bedrock Linux?

This is pretty cool, I got to try it

I want to go back to Linux and can't decide between debian 12 or fedora 38. like debian because already know many commands and I'm familiarize with debian commands already but like fedora due to how fast it is on updates. Any suggestions????

im running ubuntu with layered distrobox on silverblue, Am i doing it right? 🤔

Seems like an awesome idea.

I wonder how well it will run on WSL?

Distro box is super cool

What does this accomplish that bedrock doesn't? Just wondering as it seems like a cool tool

Can you use this tool to containerize Windows and run apps in it?

I distro hop for no particular reason but just trying things up on bare metal. Well, my pc stays on fedora though.

Whoa. Game changer

why tf would i ever use containers any time i tried them i could NOT get them configured let alone run

Damn, how have I never heard of this...........

This will save my distro from being formatted I think

Me who never distro hopped: interesting...

It looks like Flatpack, but little complicated

I'm not distro hopping, I'm just on Arch, which by the way I use.

Steamos tutorial for distrobox?

Confused. Davinci resolve works perfectly on Linux Mint

If in the future, someone could integrate a Windows and a MacOS environment (other than a VM) on a Linux base, that would be awesome !

lol i use this to install deb packages on arch

What do Linux users use their distros for? I often times see people talking about how great certain distros are, how bad other distros are, etc, but without context on what they use their computers for, it's all meaningless to me. I've had to hop distros multiple times because of multiple things... First of all, I'm a unity game developer, so having unity, blender, visual studio, audacity, gimp, it's a must. Second, I'm a musician, so having reaper and being able to load all my VST's (eastwest opus + its libraries, native instruments kontakt and komplete kontrol + its libraries, hexeract, omnisphere, etc) is a must, but I haven't had any luck in making music while using any linux distro. I apparently botched installations of fedora (it would run at 8fps whenever I did anything other than move my mouse on the desktop, if I moved my mouse over the taskbar, it would be too much for my computer to handle), kubuntu (wouldn't make it past the BIOS), and used manjaro for a while but unity crashed every time I selected more than 4 materials at once and gimp would refuse to work with my xp-pen tablet (it would soft-lock menus, I'd click any tool and it wouldn't respond unless I opened a modal window like scaling, closed it, and then back to clicking a tool). Then I moved to Pop OS, which was working wonders, until it decided to stop opening stuff. Steam would crash (I need to run the steam deck dev tool to test my game on steam deck) and would not open at all. Blender wouldn't even give a sign of trying to open at all unless I uninstall it and reinstall it (from the discover shop). Unity would appear to load, but then straight out freeze before the editor would even show up (giving me a full screen window, showing nothing but my desktop). I figured it could be some issue with my graphics card, but for some other reason, I CAN open my game exports and still runs at over 60fps (being an HDRP project, those who know, it's demanding). So I wonder what is it that I keep doing so badly that a linux distro decides to stop working after a few months of use? Was it that I update it whenever I see that there are updates available? My last assumption, does it have to do with Kvantum? I like the glassy transparent themes, but I'm not sure if it's that, since usually after setting them up, the distro still works completely for the first weeks. (Also, Gimp still has that same soft-lock issue with the xp-pen drivers even on Pop OS), I don't think I'm doing anything stupid with any distro I attempt to work with... So I keep wondering, what do people use their distros for to claim they're so good, what is it that they use their distros for, and why is it seemingly impossible for me to be able to have a steady distro for longer than a few months? I really want to make linux work for me, but it's so tiresome having to move my over 700gb projects back and to from windows and so on every time I have an issue with a distro with no real answers (considering Unity seems to be some sort of desktop environment?) Honestly, the main reason I wanted to stick to linux was how customizable most of it was, but if I can't use custom themes from kvantum, then it feels like I'm just migrating to an unsteady version of mac or windows and I don't like feeling like I have to be treading on thin ice like that.

stop distrohopping. period.

I just use nix lmao

This is like WSL but for linux

Audio way too low compared to normal levels

Tried doing this, too confusing.

So what's the difference between Distrobox and QubesOS?

But I'm distrohopping because I like to switch desktop environment every now and then.

Never mind, I found the page.

you my friend might be the reason i finally ditch windows for linux forever

GARUDA OS bahahahahaha

Do people really distro hop? I pick a distro, install it on my servers and just let them run from then on.

no thanks. it needs to be all graphical.

No. I dont want to be insane.

No

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