toolbox VS spec

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/

Hi, Lapdev dev here. Let me try to answer your question.

It's installed on a remote server so it provides remote environments. If you use VSCode remote, then you can "open" it through VSCode remote ssh.

The environment that Lapdev provides essentially is a container (other format is on the roadmap) with things pre-installed as defined in Devcontainer(https://containers.dev/) format.

Happy to take this one, as I am one of the cofounder of Daytona.

Daytona solves all the automation and provisioning of the dev environment, actually wrote an article here laying out exactly what we do: https://www.daytona.io/dotfiles/diy-guide-to-transform-any-m...

Daytona currently supports only the dev container (https://containers.dev/) "dev env infrastructure as code" standard, but are looking to support others such as devfile, nix and flox.

Hope this helps

The full usage of the container means that you'll do the development inside the container. All the tools for development need to be installed inside the container. One of the technologies that leverage this approach is Devcontainers.

Two standards for CDE configuration exist: devfile.yml and devcontainer.json. Both assume that the CDE is a single container and allow specification of which tools should be deployed to this container, as well as a reference to scripts that should run after the container has been created.

... is how I introduced the concept of dev containers in my last article.

How it works? Dev Containers is a specification based on Docker. This specification describes a metadata file (devcontainer.json), which defines how the project (Docker container, IDE settings, plugins, etc) is set up.

Codespaces is built to run Dev Containers, an open standard for Development Containers. The Dev Container will reference a Docker build file, which describes the software and services our app is running on. It also defines things related to our development environment, including IDE plugins, network ports, and more.

I was using Devcontainer with VS Code. In a part of the container build process, DNS lookup seemed to be failing in Debian 12. BTW, the container image was based on Debian 11. I probably tried it about 10 times in total, so I'm pretty sure it persisted, not an one time error. I noticed the build process was failing because the process failed to find some domains, with an error message like could not resolve host github.com. Some domains I noticed was github.com and ghcr.io, so it failed sometimes for one domain, and sometimes for the other.

// For format details, see https://aka.ms/devcontainer.json. For config options, see the // README at: https://github.com/devcontainers/templates/tree/main/src/typescript-node { "name": "Node.js & TypeScript", // Or use a Dockerfile or Docker Compose file. More info: https://containers.dev/guide/dockerfile "image": "mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/typescript-node:1-20-bullseye", // Features to add to the dev container. More info: https://containers.dev/features. // "features": {}, // Use 'forwardPorts' to make a list of ports inside the container available locally. "forwardPorts": [8081], "initializeCommand": "bash .devcontainer/initializeCommand.sh", // Use 'postCreateCommand' to run commands after the container is created. "postCreateCommand": "bash .devcontainer/postCreateCommand.sh", // Configure tool-specific properties. // "customizations": {}, // Uncomment to connect as root instead. More info: https://aka.ms/dev-containers-non-root. // "remoteUser": "root", // "containerEnv": { // }, // "remoteEnv": { // "DEV_USER_HOST": "${localEnv:USERNAME}" // }, "runArgs": ["-p=8081:8081", "--env-file", ".devcontainer/.env"] }