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I used distrobox a while back to troubleshoot an issue I was having with my GPU where the clock speed would not go above ~5% of what it was capable of. Because I was able to test it in several distrobox containers, I was able to determine it was likely an issue with some (unknown) package/firmware that was shipping with some distros. Sometimes distro hopping starts out of curiosity to explore different distributions. Sometimes it starts out of frustration you have because of some bug and you think changing distros will solve it. Well, distrobox can sometimes help you figure that out without wiping your hard drive.

Eat the distrobox, become the distrobox. Free wifi for life.

The Steam Deck has an inmutable OS as well, so for those who have one, distrobox is very useful too.

holy crap exporting from distrobox to native sounds amazing, like magic

I never thought of running AUR in Distrobox. That is a great idea. I avoided Arch because AUR packages broke too often for me, this solves that problem

I appreciate your insight and honest reviews. Well done.

Just tried Distrobox a few days ago. Insane how awesome it is. Thanks for the videos!

So great video from Matt! Thank you! We need more content on Immutable distros!

19:25 LOL- made my day. Very entertaining and educating video. Thank you very much.

Really cool ideas.. I’m a new steam deck user and now I’m inspired with this

Great video. Thanks. When you can, I'd love to see a video detailing the rough edges of Distrobox. And a rundown of how easy or difficult it is to learn the terminal commands required to use it. How steep is the learning curve? What big features are missing? Thanks! 😊

Personally, it seems like a great way to test servers before production. I am getting into a bit of apache on linux and while it is good to set up php on it, it can get reeeally annoying to work with it sometimes. That seems like an useful solution.

thanks mr matt for teaching me how to use distrobox

Very interesting, thx LC Guy. :)

TY. Trying to remember what I used before.

I have a hardware option - that mirrors this - but only for desktop. I have the Icy-dock rail system, on a thin profile PC, for those thin 2.5 " SATA 3.0 drives. I have all the package managers represented on a spinoff distro for each mainline original on its own drive. When I want to switch distros, I slide one in and pull the other out (a 1/4" just to disconnect) - Don't have to worry about corrupted boot loaders from multiboot setups - If any systemwide damage happens - its contained to just that distro - switching time 30 -40 seconds max

One of the best fun😂❤ part of the video 18:42

Damn I really wish I had stumbled on your channel before I spent a week fiddling around with distros.

Since 2019 I run a minimal install of Ubuntu with up to 70 Virtualbox VMs on OpenZFS. I can run all the Linux distros and Windows releases with all their apps, that I want to run. My 6 main VMs are Xubuntu 24.04 LTS; Ubuntu 16.04 ESM; Ubuntu Budgie 22.04 LTS; Ubuntu 24.04 LTS; Windows XP Home and Windows 11 Pro. Currently my distro hopping VMs are Linux Mint; Zorin; Fedora; Manjaro; Debian Stable; Peppermint and OpenSUSE Leap. My HW is the 2nd slowest Ryzen ever; the Ryzen 3 2200G; 16GB; 512GB NVME (3400/2300MB/s); 2TB HDD cached by a 128GB SSD (530MB/s). The system is fast, Xubuntu and Budgie boot in less than 7 seconds; Ubuntu 16.04 and 22.04 boot in ~10 seconds. After say 1 second the VMs run from L1ARC, in my case a 4GB memory cache. It is like running the VM from a RAM disk. Windows needs more time to boot. Win XP on 1 core boots in 25 seconds, while the Win 11 boot is CPU intensive and and Ubuntu needs to create a lot of free space in the memory cache for Win 11. The boot time is between 40 and 60 seconds. Note that all my storage and both caches are lz4 compressed (ratio ~1.8). I almost never game and I only use Linux games like SuperTuxKart and ExtremeTuxRacer and they run fine in a VM in 3D mode, the GPU load stays under 80% in 1080p. For the modern games you would need GPU pass through and a true GPU and a faster CPU.

🤣 started with your Get Any App on Any Distro Easily... thanks Matt

Nice presentation. [BuddyBox has upped its game]. Like you say, Distrobox federalizes Linux, glueing all the city states together. Very interesting development. It also imposes (benignly) a logic to the Linux Journey. Every new user can be pointed to...Debian? PopOS? Mint?...but can then climb the Linux ladder if they want, by experimenting on DB. Effectively it can seriously mitigate the Linux pain point of crashed systems. Great presentation, sprinkled with comedy

10:07 nixos actually has very good software availability too (it has hyprland) it only lacks snap and that's it

The aur is cool but the obs is cooler and more stable. Loving tumbleweed ( got man pages to work). Where/How did you get the lizard instead of the infinity sign on neofetch? Thanks Matt. Great video!

Matt, doing a video how to install and use say, qtile on silverblue with distrobox would be a great episode.

Hi, very good explanation of what is possible with distrobox. I have also tried distrobox but always get stucked with creating a distrobox with the proprietary nvidia drivers and cuda. Davinci Resolves alwasy says, that no graphics card has been found. On my host System the nvidia card works.... Any suggestions here? Maybe you could make a video about distrobox and nvidia in combination with davinci resolve, would help me so much.... thx

I love having different boxes for different work loads. I can create a debian development environment and an arch gaming one export any gui's. This means it's easier for me to adhere to silverblue or nix way of doing things for my root system and if I have another logj situation I just delete that environment.

Debian Stable + Distrobox + Debian Sid/Unstable container = Buh bye backports :)

tbh i've een wanting to use it for a while but it seems so complicated to setup, i found that blend os containers seem easier

LOL 😂 -- I love your joking about Arch fanboys close to the end of the video. Glorious! On the serious end, building bridges between the various distros is s great thing. Thanks for pointing this out!

btop looks amazing

In distrobox, is there a problem that theming doesn't apply on apps like happening in the flatpaks?

Two problems with distrobox. 1) Say I'm on arch - but I want to install printer drivers that come from ubuntu (e.g Brother printers). I can't seem to do that. 2) Creating a fresh window manager session based on another system sounds very cool. Someone suggested 'qtile on silverblue with distrobox would be a great episode' sounds a great idea!

Nice video! But I have a question noone could answer before. In your case, does that exported Vivaldi browser from Arch also get updated when you perform zypper up/dup on your openSUSE main system? If not, how is it done? Do you have to update every Distrobox application manually like in shitty Windows?

Distrobox export is a beautiful feature

There was no live stream yesterday.

As a complete linux noob, i'm mainly confused about this: if i'm running debian stable, i'm also using an older linux kernel. So if i run arch within distrobox, that arch will as well use the older kernel. Won't that break stuff?

Distrobox seems based on podman or docker... hmm... seems very reliable for stateful applications. I think it is better to implement this on top of LXC

Man you do have it real bad... 🤣 I see the point of this program and it is neat. If I had a use case for it someday I know where to come for help... lol Thanks Matt! So how many do you have in there and how big is that closet? 🤣 LLAP 🖖

Vivaldi has their own install script, don't they? Pretty sure I've messed around with it before, and recently.

I consider to use fedora immutable,, and there toolbox already installed,, Do you think I should replace it with distrobox?,, cause so far im okey with dnf / copr,

vivaldi... come on man

I would like to know how to update the BIOS version of my HP laptop using Arch Linux, similar to Garuda linux. If possible, could you create a video tutorial on this topic? Your help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance!

Is it possible to run a different DE in Distrobox? Say if my host is running Gnome 45 and I want to run Gnome 44 so my fav Gnome extensions don't break. Possible?

Its not a flaw its the whole point that immutable os are locked on the system lol …

Now we just need a distro manager for distrobox, because there’s no way I’m going into all those distos and running updates.

Nice app launcher. Which is its it?

Oh yeah, i've been interested in the way applications like distrobox performs their containerization Like how do they execute the container commands in the host? And also, what containerization platform do they use - docker? Or LXC?

Running an entire fleet of containers just for package equality seems a bit wasteful to me, not just from a resource utilization standpoint. It is not the cleanest approach either where you have to look after not one but essentially multiple systems with each their own package managers and programs. "Where did i install obs again? was it in my distro repos or was it from flatpak? Was it from the debian repos? Oh no I think i got it from the AUR, right? right?". I know this might sound annoying to bring it up from seemingly nowhere but cross platform package managers like nix exist which tackle this problem in a (in my opinion) better way. That being said distro box does have lots of cool features I just think that simply for getting packages it might not be the best tool for the job.

Would like to try it, but not available on Debian 12 so far.

Reason 0: I'm on an immutable OS

So it's like wine, but for Linux

I use Arch btw

i think the whole premise of distrobox and similar container solutions comes to the same conclusion. (of course there are other things like development and immutability as you mentioned but they are never the focus) and that conclusion is "if you don't have AUR, with distrobox you can have AUR" well, then what is the allure of distrobox for arch linux users, they already have AUR. ps: also i believe nix package manager is a much better solution if one's problem and main concern is not being able to install any package on any distro.

Thats what i thought was in the closet!

even before watching, i'm like, i've already been using bedrocklinux for a decade, why would i need or want distrobox? i already bedrock, so why would i distrobox? ... maybe there's a reason... will watch. :)

I don't need distrobox, because, say it with me, "I've got the AUR".

A completely pointless project for any normal user. Even in the case of normal user or dev, this is one of the reasons why people hate Linux. This kind of monster distro madness shouldn't be encouraged. Everything should be working across all Linux distributions the same way anyway, and for the most part does with a little effort (apart from the package manager). Distrobox is a monster born from the stupidities of Linux, but again, no one should need it if they know what they're doing. Useful for devs only.