boxkit VS distrobox

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

Regarding the stability issue on a dev machine - you may be interested in playing with one of the immutable-os distros, such as SilverBlue (fedora based).

The high-level take-away is you can't break your actual OS since it's root filesystem is read-only, and you use "pet" containers (on docker, podman, whatever) to do your work in. Applications are either sandboxed via Flatpak, or installed/run inside your pet containers. If your pet container dies, you cry about it for a moment, and when you're ready you get a new one - your actual os and other containers remain unaffected.

I use distrobox[1] to create/run the pet containers.

[1] https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox

Distrobox is a tool that enables us to try Linux distro CLI, including their package manager. This requires a containerization tool (e.g., Docker). In Windows, this can be achieved using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

I use containerized versions of things, ubuntu and chainguard images mostly.

You can always create containers with init if that's how you want to do that though. Some distros publish images that come that way: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38505448 ... https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_...

Yes, you can do that but I've seen others use something like distrobox to run linux inside of SteamOS: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/posts/steamdeck_guide.md

For such cases you might use something like this: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox

Btw #3: Depending on what the user is trying to accomplish, e.g. maybe to make WSL(2) itself more of a "subsystem" than a "container engine", using something like Distrobox or nsbox.dev can be a good idea (along with Docker or Podman in Distrobox's case; the other one uses systemd-nspawn).

1. Find here in "Containers Distros" section the distro image that you want to install ("Toolbox" versions are better because they are configured for Distrobox) and get it URL: https://distrobox.it/compatibility/#containers-distros 2. Use that URL to create Distrobox: distrobox create -i registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox:39 -n fedora_1_39 3. Enter Distrobox fedora_1_39: distrobox enter fedora_1_39 4. You are already in Distrobox console. Look at the name in console, it should be include the container name. 5. To exit Distrobox: exit 6. If you run: distrobox list you will see all distroboxes on the system. You will also see that distrobox that we exited is still running. 7. To stop distrobox use commands: distrobox stop fedora_1_39