boxkit VS toolbox

https://universal-blue.org

Using the Bazzite image has replaced Windows for me. Basically everything works.

There are a slew of images built on Fedora Silverblue and a lot of them are very interesting. The ability to rebase in and out of base images safely and atomically is really powerful and liberating. If you haven’t tried an “immutable” distribution, I would highly recommend it. It really does feel like the most logical way to run Linux with zero fuss and maximum flexibility and safety,

https://universal-blue.org/

There isn't something completely like that, but Fedora Silverblue comes really close (and [Universal Blue](https://universal-blue.org/) pushes it slightly closer)

Once installed run the Universal Blue rebase script to make the Kinoiite OS more user friendly. (https://universal-blue.org/)

I'm thinking about Silverblue and Kenoite. Especially, I'm looking at the Universal Blue project. UBlue, because creating your ISO is dead simple because it starts from an OCI image declaration (docker compose).

I'm on a https://universal-blue.org/ -based "custom image" of Fedora Silverblue and I love it. In my image, I ship some essentials software and other things that are just easy to have in there like fonts, plus a script for installing gnome extensions. Then I have a Nix home-manager -based shell configuration containing some common developer tools as well. The bulk of the (GUI) software I use comes as Flatpaks, and my development environment is a distrobox arch container.

I've set all updates to be automatic and almost never have to worry about them. I am on the :latest tag and my computer updates between major versions automatically, and I haven't had any breakage yet. I feel pretty confident in the stability of my system and feel like were the disk to corrupt, I could get back up and running with the exact same setup very quickly.

Hi! I worked on this with some friends over the past two years or so (we had to work on the generic tooling first: https://universal-blue.org/)

I'm happy to answer questions you might have! Thanks for checking it out! (I'll be at KubeCon Chicago with stickers if you want the live demo on a Framework 13)

This is actually run my computer, with a fedora-silverblue based image but my CLI is running alpine images.

So I made a little kit so anyone can do this on any linux so you can try all the cool stuff in there without the downsides of running a less popular configuration on the bare metal.

And since it's Alpine it's always a fast download vs. a heavier container.

https://github.com/ublue-os/boxkit

The team has both made a ton of effort switching off their proprietary Skia based rendering tech and adopting standard Wayland, and has put forward huge effort to making running incredibly well integrated real Linux containers just work.

The headline is true. ChromeOS is Linux with Google’s desktop environment. But it obfuscates the details. It's a damned by omission statement. It has some really good sauce to help you not notice often, but it's not at all a Linux desktop environment one can regularly use. You can do a lot of Linux desktop-y things but only through well crafted special unique wrapped processes that mostly but not fully help mock & emulate a regular Linux desktop. Even though it now runs Wayland, the apps you want to run will have atypical intermediates up the wazoo.

And no one else uses any of this tech. ChromiumOs has so much interesting container tech, does such an interesting job making containers think they have a regular Linux / FreeDesktop environment. It's far far far far deeper virtualization than for example https://github.com/containers/toolbox . But you know what? Google has made zero effort to get these pieces adopted elsewhere. It's open source but not intended for use outside Chromium/ChromeOS. I respect & think ChromeOS is a quite viable Linux, and it's so much closer to the metal & more interesting, amazing tech, but my gods Microsoft has gone 300x further to establish wsl2 as a sustainable community effort folks could use & target, in a way that ChromiumOS has done nothing about.

It's sad how Google has transformed from a company that appreciated & worked with ecosystems, that drove things collectively forward, into an individual player that does their own things & delivers from on high. ChromiumOS is such an incredible effort, but it's so internernally drive & focused, and it's hard to believe in such a wildcat effort, even though it's so so good. It keeps coming into better alignment with Linux Desktop actual, but via shims and emulations that no one else cares about or which seems marketed elsewhere. And that inward focus makes the whole effort both so exceptional & promising, but suspect. Such a different nearby but alternative & separately governed universe. ChromiumOS/ChromeOS do excellent at faking being a Linux desktop, and wonderfully have increasingly drawn more strength from that universe, but are still wholly their own very distinct very separate very controller other space. In many ways that's great, secure, good, and miraculously transparently done. But it's still hard to really trust, being such a weird alien impostor, faking so much for end user apps, and there's tension in believing ChromeOS will keep straddling the rift in pro-user manifestations forever.

I'm really, really happy with my current setup of Fedora immutable + toolbox [0]. This tool lets you create containers that are fully integrated with the system, so you have acces to the entire Fedora repos, can run graphical apps, etc. while still having everything inside a container in your home directory. That means no Flatpak required. Highly recommended.

[0] https://containertoolbx.org

Seems like toolbox is also in this space; https://github.com/containers/toolbox

With Silverblue the core repos are very similar to what you'd have on regular Fedora. With more of a philosophical shift about where you're supposed to install things from. The idea being that the base OS is immutable and you keep it fairly minimal - even though you are technically free to install any of Fedora packages to it. And then you install user applications through Flatpak and toolbx. Where these more user space focussed applications are installed to your home directory and are sandboxed away from actual access to your OS. With iOS/Android style application permissions like "Give app permission to access camera" and "Give app permission to modify files in home directory". Allowing you even further customise the sandboxing of applications. Do you really want that app to have access to your microphone?

I'd probably try running it on the host system first. If you want to use your nvidia gpu inside toolbox, you would indeed need to install the drivers in the container: https://github.com/containers/toolbox/issues/116

Use toolbox on CentOS or Ubuntu if you want a Fedora environment with more up to date tools: https://containertoolbx.org/