Huge shootout to the Distrobox devs, you saved my day :)
I brew beer as a hobby. I’ve been using Joliebulle 3 for close to 10 years because it’s FOSS and super simple to use, and I’m too lazy to switch to another brewing app. It’s been unmaintained for almost 5 years, but it wonderfully does exactly what I want from a brewing software. I was missing this crucial “piece of equipment” since I migrated to Fedora.
Brew day is tomorrow. I forgot to look into it until it was almost too late.
This is one of those things that I’d come across and went “huh thats pretty cool” then promptly for got about, so this is a nice reminder about distrobox haha
I’ll have to go back and mess with it, such a cool tool to have
I know you said you’re too lazy to switch to a different brewing app, but you should really check out kleiner Brauhelfer
If you switch to Arch, this is waiting for you in AUR 😊.
What is Distrobox? Something for immutable OSes?
From a user perspective, Distrobox is a tool that lets you “spin up any distro inside your terminal”.
You can basically create a mini Linux environment of any distro that you can access through the terminal. You can set it to share your home folder, our create a new home folder just for that mini environment.
Behind the scenes Distrobox is creating and managing containers through Podman or Docker. You could technically achieve the same thing by manually setting up Podman containers, Distrobox just makes it very easy to create and maintain those containers with the correct permissions. It also has useful tools where you could install an app in a Distrobox container, but then add that app to your host OS app list.
This makes it especially useful for immutable OSs. Instead of adding packages to your base OS, which should be kept as minimal as possible, you can just install them in a Distrobox, so your host’s root filesystem is unaffected.
In a way, but chroot only isolates file systems (process only has access to an isolated “root” which isn’t the actual host’s root). Rootless Podman/Docker goes a few steps beyond and utilizes cgroups, and user namespaces to isolate not only file systems, but also processes and networking.
Here is a high level overview.
Can you run Wayland GUI apps in distrobox?
Yes. I run VS Code in an Ubuntu distrobox, with the electron wayland flags. Works real nice. KDE Wayland btw.
VSCode is an electron application, right? Electron apps use xwindow (or xwayland) unless you launched them with certain flags. I’m interested to know if native Wayland app actually works. Or is it possible that distrobox is actually use xwindow and pass everything to the host’s xwayland process? Can’t seem to find anything about it in the docs.
Yes, VSCode is an electron app, and I use flags to launch it with Wayland. I export VSCode to the host system with the flags attached, so that VSCode automatically launches in Wayland. The command I used: distrobox-export --app code --extra-flags "--enable-features=WaylandWindowDecorations --ozone-platform-hint=auto"
I’m pretty sure it’s wayland because on KDE wayland, with 200% scaling, when the cursor is over an xwayland window, it looks blurry. This doesn’t happen on wayland windows. Also for some reason electron and chromium based apps run at 60 fps on wayland, while xwayland apps run at 144 fps as it should, and my VS Code in the Distrobox with the wayland flags also runs at 60 fps. Weird KDE stuff.
