Huge Distrobox fan

Posted Jan 7, 2026 20:40 UTC (Wed) by archaic (subscriber, #111970)
In reply to: Huge Distrobox fan by jmalcolm
Parent article: Mix and match Linux distributions with Distrobox

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.