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Comment by FireInsight | Hacker News Reader

Should include project name in title (distrobox). This is really a game changer for immutable distros. I use Fedora Kinoite and basically everything I use is in an Arch distrobox or flatpak. Best part is, you can just throw a box in the trash and create a new one with only stuff you need. Distrobox-assemble will simplify it further.

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I personally prefer building custom images for these distroboxes, where I set up entire toolchains etc inside. So then my OS is immutable, but also all the build tools and whatnot can be rebuilt using a simple podman build command.

Generally only really desktop-ish stuff stays on the host machine (e.g. i3, but also polybar and dmenu), but the rest goes into these distroboxes.

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.

What is it that you like about running Arch within Fedora, vs. just running Arch (or any other alternatives you have tried)?

I run an Arch VM on Windows; I started out setting up Arch in the VM while experimenting with booting into Arch raw (it's installed on a dedicated, physical disk), but I became distracted and never perfected the raw boot setup, so I just use it as a VM, which I tolerate. The idea of Distrobox intrigues me but I'm not imaginative enough to see how it would help me, so I'm keen to hear your thoughts.

Edit: ah I got to the part of your repo where you mention the below, and I'm watching your video (https://youtu.be/7-FPAWjROos). Makes sense.

>Also, I've never gotten really to know Alpine, the problem with running distros like this bare metal on my PC is that there's a whole bunch of hardware quirks and all sorts of little enablement things that more generalized distros tend to get right.

BTW I Use Arch

Not the OP but one nice thing about Arch is the AUR. Practically everything you could want per-packaged and up-to-date. Distrobox let’s you have this killer Arch advantage on whatever base distro you want. Maybe you love Debian but find the outdated packeges an issue ( fixed ). Perhaps you love Apline but cannot afford to fight with Musl compat ( fixed ).

I love the idea of Chimera Linux and would love to daily drive it. However, package availability is going to be a constant drag. Oh, and it uses Musl as well. Both these problems go away running Distrobox / Arch on top. I could keep the base system clean and simple while having a dev environment that is frictionless and full featured ).

Oh, first off, I'm not Jorge, sorry, I just forked his repo. haha. But yeah, watch all his videos to get an idea of what's cool about this.

Basically, I use Fedora as an "immutable" base system, then install all my userland apps in an Arch container. It's just a really clean way to run things. My base install never really changes much, and tracks upstream Fedora. Then, if I want to do unsupported things, like install Python packages from Pip and Pacman at the same time, I can, knowing that if I get a conflict, I can just blow it all away and start over without even logging out.

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. Assemble was the last missing piece, I'm looking forward to duct taping all of this together!

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.

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