distrobox VS nix-alien

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

copy the extracted files over to the nix output dir, and patch-elf all the binaries to link to the nix-version of the dynamic lib.

This sounds more difficult than it is, the result will be a copied over binary file that has its “libc.so” and other dynamic libs replaced in the ELF-header with “/nix/store/hdjdewuieu737-libc/libc.so”. I recommend looking up a package in nixpkgs which has a similar install story, that’s the easiest way to write a new package.

In case you only want to run it locally https://github.com/thiagokokada/nix-alien and similar programs work fine with the binary.

You might be interested in tools like nix-alien which help, though to some extent it's always going to be an annoyance.

There's also nix-alien to run random binaries and nixos-fhs-compat to FHS your OS (might need some tweaking).