Distrobox is the single piece of software that completely changed the way I work. If you’ve hear of or used Vagrant and thought it was a great idea but implemented in a really heavy handed manner, then Distrobox is exactly what you’ve been looking for.
Within a month Distrobox became my primary dev environment and that hasn’t changed for over a year. In this post I hope to share how I use Distrobox and give you some tips for making the experience even better.
My issue with flatpaks is that having too many flatpaks becomes a chore to manage. I did not have a fun time with Steam in a flatpak (required some mucking around to get the DPI and cursor size right) and same with Chromium a while back (took me a long time to figure out how to pass on the flags to enable Wayland support). IMO, having a single container (or a container for a particular activity, like gaming) would be a much more cleaner approach, while offering the flexibility akin to a mutable OS (so no weird flatpak quirks to deal with… in theory). This would also make things like backups easier, I could just save my “gaming” container to one tar and not worry about whether I missed any dependencies etc.
Yeah that’s totally fair. It’s definitely far from perfect. Although, I do like that it provides at least some level of isolation.
If that is your ideal setup, then I think VanillaOS and its
apxpackage manager might be of interest to you.That’s pretty much what I do, spin up a container for anything I need to do and everything is within that… once I’ve finished I blow the container away and all the dependencies go with it. Currently use proxmox as a frontend for that although I ran on the command line for ages before switching to a beefier server.
I do the same with docker - nest it in a container so everything is together (and also so it can’t screw around with the host networking). eg. my lemmy container has the lemmy docker and its dependencies together.