Seamlessly run other Linux distributions inside your terminal

• distrobox

  402 8,927 9.6 Shell

  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

Thanks for the shout out! I haven't seen people talk about some of the other features so I'll mention a few for the others:

At first you do it manually like keeping an ubuntu LTS box around for when I need to do that kind of stuff. Then over time you get annoyed that you have to maintain it and while you've removed the host-maintenance from your life it does feel like you've just shifted the problem to the right and multiplied it every time you make a new box.

So the next logical step is to just make it declarative, so it's one of the reasons we made boxkit. Distrobox has an exciting new feature coming out called assemble: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/usage/d...

And since all this stuff is just docker containers you can just pick your distro, pick your list of packages, and then let git and the automation deal with it, you'll always have your dev environment.

https://github.com/ublue-os/boxkit is the "kit" if anyone wants to help out, when you fork it it'll bring the github actions with it, so you can set up builds of your boxes and they'll always be up to date. It's based on alpine but that part can be swapped out no problem.

And for those of you who think this is just too far, `distrobox upgrade` can be useful when you have way too many pets.

• toolbox

  109 2,273 9.1 Shell

  Tool for interactive command line environments on Linux (by containers)

  

Quoting the README:

   It implements the same concepts introduced by https://github.com/containers/toolbox but in a simplified way using POSIX sh and aiming at broader compatibility.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• boxkit

  1 11 4.6 Dockerfile

  A blingier starting image for Toolbx and Distrobox. (by pkulak)

Never heard of distrobox-assemble, but it sounds intriguing. I currently let Microsoft build and host my container once a week:

https://github.com/pkulak/boxkit

And yeah, like you, I basically live in Arch despite running Fedora. My terminal opens directly into the Arch container, and I’m even installing more and more GUI apps in there, since they are so easy to export to my host launcher.

• mkosi

  16 1,042 9.9 Python

  💽 Build Bespoke OS Images

  

For testing i prefer systemd-nspawn containers with mkosi. A neat tool for running your other fav. distro in a terminal. Works like a charm and integrates nicely in your system. Eg. logs and systemd services or CI testing.

- https://github.com/systemd/mkosi

- man:systemd-nspawn(1)

- man:machinectl(1)

• bedrocklinux-userland

  152 590 6.9 C

  This tracks development for the things such as scripts and (defaults for) config files for Bedrock Linux

  

If you want to actually use multiple distributions at once integrated tightly into each other (like using Ubuntu with AUR packages) I highly recommend https://bedrocklinux.org/. It uses some chroot and symbolic link magic to share files across filesystems.

• boxkit

  16 145 6.0 Dockerfile

  Build your own custom OCI distrobox container

  

Thanks for the shout out! I haven't seen people talk about some of the other features so I'll mention a few for the others:

At first you do it manually like keeping an ubuntu LTS box around for when I need to do that kind of stuff. Then over time you get annoyed that you have to maintain it and while you've removed the host-maintenance from your life it does feel like you've just shifted the problem to the right and multiplied it every time you make a new box.

So the next logical step is to just make it declarative, so it's one of the reasons we made boxkit. Distrobox has an exciting new feature coming out called assemble: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/usage/d...

And since all this stuff is just docker containers you can just pick your distro, pick your list of packages, and then let git and the automation deal with it, you'll always have your dev environment.

https://github.com/ublue-os/boxkit is the "kit" if anyone wants to help out, when you fork it it'll bring the github actions with it, so you can set up builds of your boxes and they'll always be up to date. It's based on alpine but that part can be swapped out no problem.

And for those of you who think this is just too far, `distrobox upgrade` can be useful when you have way too many pets.

Suggest a related project