nixos-fhs-compat VS distrobox

You can, in theory, use https://github.com/balsoft/nixos-fhs-compat for this.

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

Thanks, it was fun working with containers in NixOS! I tweaked the config a little bit so that the DISPLAY variable is automatically set and I also added nixos-fhs-compat's modules so that the guest OS uses FHS. Overall, a very slick setup if you want to run GPU-accelerated software quickly or what to do software development in a more traditional environment.

There's buildFHSUserEnv as the proper way to run those apps, and there's also a massive hack that I don't really recommend using on your host: https://github.com/balsoft/nixos-fhs-compat . If you want to use it, do it with something similar to this: https://github.com/balsoft/kalinix/blob/master/scripts/run-container and then run your vscode/android studio/etc inside that container. The final option is to just run another distro with docker or lxc, set up X11/Wayland passthru to it and run stubborn applications that way.

The root filesystem only contains two FHS-y symbolic links by default: /bin/sh and /usr/bin/env (and some /etc stuff that is hardcoded in some applications and wasn't considered to be worth patching). All the other files are kept in non-FHS-compliant locations (/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/*/default and /run/current-system/sw or /nix/var/nix/profiles/system). This means, for example, that binaries from other Linux distros won't run unless they have been statically compiled with musl (because there's no dynamic linker at /lib/ld-linux.so.2). There's this hack courtesy of Matthew Bauer that links stuff to FHS locations: https://github.com/balsoft/nixos-fhs-compat , but it's not supported upstream and it doesn't change how all the internal Nix stuff works, it's only a wrapper to allow running FHS and LSP-reliant binaries.

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