static-toolbox VS distrobox

https://github.com/Azathothas/static-toolbox

I had to mention 4, because people kept asking us about security concerns.

Docker, Distrobox, Flatpak, and a bit of Homebrew where it makes sense

89luca89 mentioned that MacOS support was not in scope here: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/issues/1697

but I've loved the project since my time on Linux and wanted the same in Mac land. I've just been too skittish to try... I had Claude help me cuz I figured if Linus could do a side project with some LLM prompting maybe I could, too.

Anyway, added some tests, got an MVP working, and started using it for my own use-cases at work the same day.

distrobox to test install and binaries on various OS and architectures

Your "pet" containers basically become your traditional OS, in a way. They use filesystem layering, so your container can see all of the files on your system, plus it's own layered files, ie. each container has it's own "view" of the filesystem.

You can install anything inside your "pet" containers that you would normally install on your actual system. The container keeps everything tidy and self-contained. I have a container for development, another for music/DAW, another for certain games that needed weird deps.

Fedora Kinoite/Silverblue come with `Toolbx`[1] preinstalled, but I found `distrobox`[2] to be more flexible for my needs. I layered distrobox onto my base image, and it just works.

[1] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/toolb...

[2] https://distrobox.it/

Very interesting, thank you for sharing!

Unfortunately it looks like sandbox mode [0] is not a goal, so it doesn't solve the main problem I have - running semi-trusted apps (e.g. Android Studio) and minimising their impact. Currently I just share X11 socket and run it in Docker.

[0] https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/issues/28

> I'm not sure what type of software you're talking about...

The original post mentions several examples where he ran into friction. (Monitoring/tracking software, pinentry-kwallet, playwright, tableplus).

A popular escape hatch for NixOS (or other immutable distros) for commandline tools is distrobox. https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox

Another good tip mentioned on the NixOS wiki FAQ is nix-ldd with the dependencies from steam-run.

Still. The benefit of having a declared system configuration does come with the cost of having to put in that effort up front; and a steeper learning curve for knowing how to get around those difficulties compared to more typical distros.

I made a (very personally) light bash script named boxkit for setup routine of a development container created by distrobox to be more handy. Please refer https://github.com/mtwtkman/boxkit