distrobox VS devbox

That seems more like Distrobox to me(?) https://distrobox.it/

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

Before I went on my Christmas vacation last year I wrote an article on how I use Nix in my Elm projects. At the time, I was pleased with my set up. However, not even a month would go by before my satisfaction was questioned. In early January, Carlo Ascani asked a question, on the Elm Discourse, about his Umbra project. I decided to explore his project and I soon discovered two files, devbox.json and devbox.lock, I had never seen before. This piqued my curiosity and I had to learn more. I followed the link to the Devbox website and feverishly read the docs. I... was... hooked. I was pleasantly surprised by its simplicity and it seemed to fit my use cases really well.

How does Flox compare to Devbox? https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox

I've spent the last year managing all my packages with Devbox (https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox).

Local dev, cloud dev, CI, production – all with the same config file. Fingers crossed my talk submission for PackagingCon gets accepted. It'd be awesome to share this new way of working with a wider audience.

> Now to figure out what a "flake" is…

Flake is a worthwhile addition to Nix that is worth learning. But like anything Nixian, it's not straightforward.

Have you checked out any of the tools that aim to simplify Nix experience? We built Devbox (https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox) with this in mind.

Also devbox ( https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox ) which is what this is for does not work on windows because of its Nix dependency.

For these reasons, I believe most developer environments should prioritize developer experience over fidelity. Tools like Containerized development environments and cloud emulators can strike the right balance and there’s no surprise that we see increased activity around devcontainers, and similar solutions.

Local first, cloud optional is the only way (IMHO) we're going to get people off their local laptop development setups.

We need to support local dev environments first, with the exact same config a developer can then move to the cloud.

See https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox for how this can be achieved and https://www.mikenikles.com/blog/dev-environments-in-the-clou... for my thoughts after 3 years of working in this space.

If you like the properties of Nix, but find it confusing, you should check out Devbox! It simplifies the process of creating Nix-powered dev environments:

https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox

As part of the work we've been doing with [devbox](https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox), we needed a unit testing framework to test some of our nix code. Unfortunately we had some use cases where we did *not* want to introduce a dependency on `nixpkgs` (and therefore we couldn't use `runTests`).