Use Distrobox to containerise your desktop
blog.9wd.eu
When I first heard about the Steam Deck I was keen to get my hands on one, and while I cannot claim to be a gamer, I do have a few games in my Steam library that I enjoy firing up on the sofa in the evenings. The Steam Deck also has a desktop mode, but as SteamOS is immutable by default, additional applications need to be installed via flatpak, which does not offer the same variety of applications as other distributions such as Ubuntu.

I saw yesterday that the current development version of Distrobox has gained the ability to define applications not only to the desktop launcher, but now also to the $PATH to invoke distrobox applications from the cli.

For those who have not yet heard of Distrobox, I wrote the linked blog explaining how I can now run a cli tool that I have already packaged for a ci pipeline in a Distrobox on my Steam deck.

  • ebits21English
    5·
    1 year ago

    Very, very cool!

    I use Silverblue with distrobox and was really hoping for a way to keep track of what I’ve installed in my distrobox images, since tracking layered packages is so easy in Silverblue already.

    I’ve been intrigued by nix’s declarative aspects and this seems like a great way to have something similar with distrobox.

    Edit: and yes, exporting to $PATH is also great! Right now I just have two different terminals: one launches into a distrobox image, the other the main os. Now I just need one. 😎

    • user8e8f87e@berlin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      @ebits21 @Fbartels #Silverblue should replace #Toolbx with #Distrobox. Toolbx was first they had the idea, but now it is only inferior. I think Toolbx devolopers should abandon their project and just start to work on Distrobox.

      I also agree that Silverblue should become fully declarative so that we can rebuild it with all layered packages, distroboxes, and flatpaks.