distrobox VS flatpak

Compare distrobox vs flatpak and see what are their differences.

distrobox

Use any linux distribution inside your terminal. Enable both backward and forward compatibility with software and freedom to use whatever distribution you’re more comfortable with. Mirror available at: https://gitlab.com/89luca89/distrobox (by 89luca89)

flatpak

Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework (by flatpak)
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distrobox flatpak
401 431
8,758 4,013
- 1.3%
9.7 9.0
3 days ago 4 days ago
Shell C
GNU General Public License v3.0 only GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 only
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

distrobox

Posts with mentions or reviews of distrobox. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-27.
  • Tools for Linux Distro Hoppers
    7 projects | dev.to | 27 Mar 2024
    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)
  • Fedora Atomic Desktops
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Feb 2024
    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_...

  • Battery consumption of using remote development with WSL2?
    2 projects | /r/bashonubuntuonwindows | 7 Dec 2023
    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).
  • Clang now makes binaries an original Pi B+ can't run
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Dec 2023
  • An independent package manager that every hacker deserves
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Nov 2023
    I've been using Linuxbrew for few months last year, it was always hit-or-miss whether some tool will work or if it will be macOS only recipe.

    Then I started using aarch64 CPUs, and Linuxbrew still doesn't work on those. Bummer.

    So while I'd love to see a package manager that spans all Linux distros, Homebrew is not it, at least for now. Nix may be it, but it has its own interesting issues at times.

    I recently used distrobox to run Arch Linux container on Fedora host and it was a good experience. I did not try exposing the CLIs from there to the host OS but it sounds possible https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/usage/d... . I don't want to daily-drive Arch again, but it's a great project to install fresh versions of various CLI tools from.

  • Flathub – The Linux App Store
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Nov 2023
  • FLaNK Stack Weekly 09 Oct 2023
    13 projects | dev.to | 10 Oct 2023
  • NixOS and Flakes Book: An unofficial book for beginners (free)
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Oct 2023
    I use NixOS as a daily driver. (My previous Linux of choice had been Arch).

    I'd describe Nix as 95% wonderful, 5% hugely painful.

    I learned Nix by using it on macOS/Linux before trying NixOS. I was concerned that NixOS would be very difficult to use.

    It was easier to use NixOS than I expected; the main problems I ran into were when a tool would helpfully download some kind of binary, but since NixOS doesn't put its shared libraries where other Linuxes do, these programs wouldn't work. -- Though, for a popular-enough tool, most likely someone else already has a Nix package written that helps out.

    There are other "escape hatches". e.g. I think something like distrobox could be used if native-on-NixOS stuff has problems. https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox

    Nix can otherwise be difficult if you need to write some Nix code. There are several concepts in Nix which are foreign enough to how things have been done before; e.g. when building a package, it won't have access to $HOME; but, recent language tooling will often want access to $HOME. -- If something goes wrong, you may often need a wider and deeper understanding compared to if something goes wrong on a more typical Linux distribution.

    For as difficult as it is, the trade-offs Nix makes are essentially "I'm going to put in a lot of effort now, so that I don't have to put in effort some time later". (This favours Nix when "effort later" is multiplied many times).

    Overall, as a choice for "I need this to work right now", I'd recommend against NixOS (especially for someone who doesn't know Nix).

  • Toolship: A (More) Secure Workstation
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Sep 2023
    I'm running silverblue but running my containers through distrobox. Both toolbox and distrobox are running on podman under the hood, so it's the same technology as far as I understand. However, distrobox has some interesting features relevant to this idea of development isolation. One is that it has an assemble feature[1] built-in. Where you can feed it a recipe file and it will build or rebuild containers accordingly. The other is that it allows setting a custom home directory for the container, among other host/container isolating options[2].

    Perfomance wise my containers take a couple MiB of rams and no perceptible CPU usage when not in use. At least as far as I can tell.

    [1] https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/usage/d...

    [2] https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/usage/d...

  • i386 in Ubuntu Won't Die
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Aug 2023

flatpak

Posts with mentions or reviews of flatpak. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-27.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing distrobox and flatpak you can also consider the following projects:

toolbox - Tool for interactive command line environments on Linux

steam-runtime - A runtime environment for Steam applications

firejail - Linux namespaces and seccomp-bpf sandbox

wsl-distrod - Distrod is a meta-distro for WSL 2 which installs Ubuntu, Arch, Debian, Gentoo, etc. with systemd in a minute for you. Distrod also has built-in auto-start feature on Windows startup and port forwarding ability.

Autodesk-Fusion-360-for-Linux - This is a project, where I give you a way to use Autodesk Fusion 360 on Linux!

docker-android - Android in docker solution with noVNC supported and video recording

rustdesk - An open-source remote desktop, and alternative to TeamViewer.

toolbox-vscode - Toolbox Visual Studio Code integration

nix - Nix, the purely functional package manager

toolbox - The Docker Toolbox

vscode-dev-containers - NOTE: Most of the contents of this repository have been migrated to the new devcontainers GitHub org (https://github.com/devcontainers). See https://github.com/devcontainers/template-starter and https://github.com/devcontainers/feature-starter for information on creating your own!

dockerfiles - Various Dockerfiles I use on the desktop and on servers.