distrobox VS muffin

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

EDIT 2: This is the second bug I described.

b) issues specific to the cinnamon desktop or nemo file manager that appear to be present upsteam in linux mint also (cinnamon seems less stable in general to me with it needing to be restarted more, there is a known issue with drag-and-drop, etc)

Depending on what features you use, your hardware, and which DE you prefer, you may have relatively few issues. I recommend reading around here and fedora forums but for example, I've had some minor issues with Fedora 38 Cinnamon Spin but mostly just little nitpick stuff (nothing that really impacts my workflow). example: there's a drag-and-drop issue currently open with Nemo file manager that happens on some display setups in very specific scenarios and has some workarounds (technically this was also present in F37 too) and yesterday I had an issue where my mouse cursor went past the right edge of the screen until I rebooted. But all of my apps, VMs, etc work fine. The only change I had to make in my post-setup scripts for F38 was to remove ogmtools, rdfind, and chromium-freeworld from my list of apps to install (apparently for chromium freeworld, things have been resolved upstream so it's no longer even needed to get the same effect so it is being discontinued in favor of the regular chromium package)

I tried a few searches through open cinnamon issues but nothing really stood out yet OTOH, I know some of the recent changes to Nemo/Cinnamon had caused issues which I've run into myself in F37 (such as the new themes, some Nemo drag-and-drop issues, and another issue with Nemo's input focus when clicking the toolbar button to a new folder while you are renaming a file) so still plausible this could be a Cinnamon-specific bug.

You should open an issue here, I do not see anything like this reported yet: https://github.com/linuxmint/muffin/issues

I don't know. Here - the natural place to look - it does not say.

In 5.4.10 it looks like (?) UI scaling has moved into Muffin, which isn't being used with Xmonad (although does give Cinnamon some nice per-screen scaling!), so I can

This is the right answer - it's mentioned in the PR for the mutter rebase: https://github.com/linuxmint/muffin/pull/601

The issue tracker would be a better place to make feature requests: https://github.com/linuxmint/muffin/issues