5 Reasons You Should Use Distrobox
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- čas přidán 19. 06. 2024
- I revisit Distrobox and expand on why I think it is the best tool on Linux. Period.
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==== Special Thanks to Our Patrons! ====
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==== Referenced ====
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==== Time Stamps ====
0:00 Intro
1:17 Learn the Package Managers
3:14 Learn the Distros
4:55 Any App Anywhere
10:34 Super Tool for Devs
12:35 Immutable Distro Benefits
16:15 Solving All of Linux' Problems
19:29 Wrapping Up
#distrobox #linux #thelinuxcast - Věda a technologie
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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.
already installed and it works perfectly fine
to be fair you can disable that
@@seasonal02
to be fair if you disable that the next SteamOS update will delete all your changes.
Distrobox can open up the Steam Deck to a whole new world.
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
Are you saying that you'd run a different host distribution and access AUR packages through distrobox or that you'd run Arch and use distrobox to avoid the AUR?
holy crap exporting from distrobox to native sounds amazing, like magic
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.
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.
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! 😊
There are already plenty of tutorials out in the wild... But to be honest, distrobox is quite easy to use, just type "distrobox create --archlinux myNameForArch" and whenever you wanna use that "distrobox enter myNameForArch". That's basically it, do whatever you would do on arch while in that container.
With distrobox-export firefox you can than export the applications of your arch container to your host and access it like you would with any normal application.
It really is that simple today.
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
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!
Very interesting, thx LC Guy. :)
thanks mr matt for teaching me how to use distrobox
TY. Trying to remember what I used before.
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.
Damn I really wish I had stumbled on your channel before I spent a week fiddling around with distros.
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
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
In distrobox, is there a problem that theming doesn't apply on apps like happening in the flatpaks?
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.
Matt, doing a video how to install and use say, qtile on silverblue with distrobox would be a great episode.
I have created my own ublue version before. It is not practical for most users. Using distrobox/toolbox is probably a better method for most people.
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
🤣 started with your Get Any App on Any Distro Easily... thanks Matt
10:07 nixos actually has very good software availability too (it has hyprland) it only lacks snap and that's it
let's specify it as nix package manager for people who haven't heard it before. it'd be beneficial if they knew that they could use nix package manager in other distros.
Which is good, cus snaps suck
it also lacks virt manager
@@JoeMemes i had virt-manager on nixos
@@JoeMemes no it has it i use it all the times
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?
No. It's updated with the container. So if you just have that one container you go in and update it. If you have more than one you can do
distrobox-upgrade --all
From the host and it will update all containers. I suppose you could do that if you have just one container too. That's when any ecported apps will be updated.
@@TheLinuxCast/videos Thanks, that relieves me.
And hail to the chameleon! ;-)
*no one
There was no live stream yesterday.
One of the best fun😂❤ part of the video 18:42
My best distrobox usage is installing gui apps not available as flatpak and not installing those apps in os itself even though it can be installed as rpm or available in repo so as to keep the host os as clean as possible. Installing order being flatpak>distrobox>find alternative application of not available as flatpak or native package
Debian Stable + Distrobox + Debian Sid/Unstable container = Buh bye backports :)
Vanilla OS 2.0 also looks promising
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!
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?
Vivaldi has their own install script, don't they? Pretty sure I've messed around with it before, and recently.
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
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!
Repackage them yourself, or grab a pkgbuild from the AUR. The best part about Arch is that everything has already been done for you by someone else for 95% of what you're going to want to do.
I included an Arch Wiki link on exactly that topic for Brother's Printers drivers, but it seems to have gotten my comment removed, so just search it up yourself.
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?
Technically yes. You'll need to do some work around to get systemd happy with that situation tho.
@@TheLinuxCast OK, thx. I'll research. 🙂
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!
I don't think that is possible
Can't do. No way. HP provides the BIOS update utility software only in Windows version. There is no other version. Either you do it under Windows or not.
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,
I do I'm on silver blue, distro box has a lot of easy to access features and a wider user base. I really like it's export feature and the commands come pretty naturally
@@Destide yeah, i think distrobox more advance feature, thank for reply, 👍
btop looks amazing
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 🖖
It was a walk in.
@@TheLinuxCast🤣
Its not a flaw its the whole point that immutable os are locked on the system lol …
Nice app launcher. Which is its it?
Rofi
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?
Distrobox uses docker and podman.
As for how they perform, it depends. If the container is already running, then the apps perform as if they were native. I've not seen any degradation in performance. If the container isn't running, then it takes a little while for the app to start up on the host since it has to start the container before it can launch.
Distrobox export is a beautiful feature
Indeed.
Now we just need a distro manager for distrobox, because there’s no way I’m going into all those distos and running updates.
You don't have to.
Distrobox-upgrade --all exists.
Would like to try it, but not available on Debian 12 so far.
mmm, yes it is? I've been using it on my Debian 12 install for months.
@@TheLinuxCast from testing repo?
@@TheLinuxCast my bad, found it
@@moetocafeIt is even in stable (main) repo, but are you using something like Discovery or other gui for installing packages? Because I just noticed Discovery doesn't find it but apt from command line does. I have no idea why that is because I always use apt anyway.
@@moetocafe No it is in stable. I'm not running the testing repo. Just sudo apt install distrobox and you'll be there.
vivaldi... come on man
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.
Nix is garbage, at least in my experience with it on Debian. It changes path variables left, right, and center, which makes it a pain when you deal with scripts and programs that are looking for things installed in traditional places. Now, that's a mess.
As for the whole "where did I install OBS again" thing, you don't need to care. Install it wherever and when you export it, it just shows up as a native app on the host. Upgrading each container can be done with a single line, so you never have to even go into a container to update it or anything like that. Add to that, each container uses the host's HOME directory and services infrastructure, and it's not a huge overhead on resources.
@@TheLinuxCast fair points. i suppose personal preference plays a lot into it. great to have lots of different choices to choose from 😊
So it's like wine, but for Linux
I use Arch btw
Reason 0: I'm on an immutable OS
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.
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. :)
"distro because it has the package" "no longer is this true with distrobox"
yeah. i was in the joy of this new paradigm of de-siilo'd distros since 2012 with bedrocklinux. ;-] linux's best kept secret, lol.
nice touch, @matt, including immutable usecase context.
export, nice, but, do things get messy with that over time? or well managed?
Thats what i thought was in the closet!
I don't need distrobox, because, say it with me, "I've got the AUR".
And when somebody just don't mantain them, then what? Or it is an old piece of software that your local small county only uses? Or, if you just wnna sandbox some applications so they wouldn't leak? That the uses I had with distrobox on Arch
@@Ladas552 I just said that because he was poking fun at the arch users. This does have it's uses for sure on distros that have less software though, like void or any non systemd option
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.
I don't know anyone who loves Windows, they just kind of get by with it, and most people don't know anything about other systems and don't have the time to dig through all the options. But all those who were open to it and took the chance to use Linux, they loved it! Unless you use some pointless apps from MS/Adobe etc, there is little to no reason for a consumer to stay on Windows at all.
@@minjung3350 I don't understand what that has to do with my comment. I've been using Linux for 20 years.
@@KarriOjala You said people hate Linux. But most people only know Windows. Some may use Mac or Android/Chromebook, but there they redesigned BSD/Linux into abominations that are incompatible with other systems.
How is that any better than the Linux world, where many parts at least work together?
If there is no big company, suppressing others, then it is absolutely normal that there are many different ways to manage a system. We should be happy that they come together at all, making an even better user experience for everyone.
Distrobox is a great advantage if you don't have Flatpak etc. for an application and there is only support for another distribution. Why should it only be good for devs?
@@minjung3350 Essentially, almost everything will work across all distros. It's a matter of how experienced you are with Linux in order to make it work. Pre-packaged formats are just pre-packaged formats and they don't matter much. The original files, the source, are usually available on Github. So, if the user is a beginner-intermediate (as opposed to expert) with Linux, does it make sense for them to use a 'Frankenstein OS' like this, just to run some .rpm? I doubt it, but anyone who disagrees can go ahead of course.