Huge Distrobox fan

Posted Dec 11, 2025 0:03 UTC (Thu) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876)
Parent article: Mix and match Linux distributions with Distrobox

Great write-up.

Distrobox has become an absolutely essential tool for me.

First, it is a great way to keep a system clean and organized. A dev Distrobox for a project is not only a great way of giving an app the exact dependencies it needs but it keeps them bundled together where they do not interfere with anything else. And when you are done, the entire environment can be removed, leaving the host system clean. Targeting RHEL? RHEL containers are free and legal. Dev for .NET? Put JetBrains Rider and all the .NET tools in a Distrobox.

Want to install a bunch of random apps just to try them out? I have an “experiments” Distrobox. Too much forgotten cruft built up? Just remove it.

I teach sometimes. Same story. Create a Distrobox for the class and keep all the stuff that gets installed from cluttering the host.

Want some tools to be bleeding edge and others to be rock stable? Two different Distroboxes (maybe Arch and Debian).

And Distrobox is a better Flatpak, giving access to packages regardless of Distro. I use Chimera Linux often which not only has a small package repo but uses musl and BSD utils. I always add an Arch Distrobox to it. Something not in the repos? It will be in Arch. Something absolutely needs glibc? Distrobox. Encounter a build system with dozens of incompatible core utils calls? Distrobox? Running on hardware that needs a bunch of super recent or out-of-tree modules? Build an Arch or Cachy kernel in Distrobox and copy it to the host.

Distrobox is the best.

Huge Distrobox fan

Posted Dec 12, 2025 10:51 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

This sounds like a very useful tool... but... docker is a complete dumpster fire.

Does it still work well with the other 2 supported container tools, podman and this 'lilipod'?

Huge Distrobox fan

Posted Dec 12, 2025 14:08 UTC (Fri) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

I've only used Distrobox with Podman, actually. It supported Podman first and then added support for Docker later on. So, yes -- works just fine with Podman and I imagine lilipod as well since that's also di Maio's work.

dumpsterfire ... tell us more

Posted Dec 13, 2025 12:25 UTC (Sat) by grmnsftphr (subscriber, #178591) [Link]

can you be more specific what your problems are with docker than dumpsterfire?

From my own experience from working with the takeaway that Docker simply works, unless you insist on sticking with the ancient Debian packages.

In contrast, podman had many incompatbilities, not last to the completely undiagnosable network stack... which is following the Douglas Adams model and thus constantly getting completely rewritten. This isn't safe nor secure.

The podman code base has quite some quality issues such as incorrect usage of contexts and left-over API experiments. This was acknowledged on the issue tracker but it's don't fix.

I've written Docker drivers and can say from first hand experience that the Docker code base is quite good to understand. In contrast I had so many w-t-fs with podman code and their totally broken APIs, both Docker "compatible" and proprietary, that after months of work on podman-native support I decided to archive my project.

Similar experiences can be seen from other projects where podman doesn't really reliably work on broader scope and non-trivial setups.

Huge Distrobox fan

Posted Jan 7, 2026 20:40 UTC (Wed) by archaic (subscriber, #111970) [Link]

Totally agreed. And while desktop apps are probably the more complicated use-case, I really go in for being able to run cli utils on my rather antiquated laptop. Joe mentioned, specifically distrobox-export --app signal-desktop but I almost exclusively use: distrobox-export --bin [path/to/binary]. I don't enter the boxes after that. Then a wrapper is placed in ~/.local/bin/ and so when I type "vim" it runs the wrapper which automatically uses the one found in the container. I even use multiple versions of rustc, gcc, python, etc, pretty much whatever I need when I need it as if it were installed directly on my OS. Granted, gems/pips/cpans can be bit more difficult to use, but not impossible!

My main motivation to start using it was when I was playing with image-based OSs. My motivation then pivoted to using it to keep my host OS clean. Now, my main motivation is using it for fine-grained version control of several specific apps while retaining the other benefits as well. For the times when I need the isolation, I use podman rootless containers. Not as seemless, but their purpose is different.