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.
  • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nzM
    9·
    10 months ago

    This is a neat write up, but I’m curious what gaming inside a Distrobox container would be like. For starters, is there any performance impact or potential glitches like screen tearing, and second, could I say, install a more recent mesa package in the container (assuming this is Fedora Silverblue), and have the game use it?

    • j0rge@kbin.social
      13·
      10 months ago

      Should work fine, bazzite even has a premade one, try it:

      distrobox create --nvidia --image ghcr.io/ublue-os/bazzite-arch --name bazzite-arch

      • flashgnash@lemm.ee
        10·
        10 months ago

        Out of curiosity what’s the reason to run games in a distrobox container instead of just running them in the host os?

        • ronweasleysl@lemmy.mlEnglish
          11·
          10 months ago

          The immediate advantage is that you could get newer mesa in your distrobox but continue to use a stable one in the host so that it doesn’t fuck up your more important work. I switched to using containers or flatpaks for everything on my system a while ago. I have a distrobox for running odd games I get off Itch and stuff like Steam/Bottles is from flatpak. I even run Silverblue now and haven’t had any major issues for about 2 years at this point. Hell I was switching between GNOME 45 Beta and 44 Stable like it was no big deal.

          • flashgnash@lemm.ee
            2·
            10 months ago

            I’m using the proprietary drivers anyway, afaik Mesa still isn’t as performant as Nvidia is it?

    • hackeryarn@lemmy.worldOP
      9·
      10 months ago

      That’s a super interesting idea. I will have to give that a shot!

      Right now I just use flatpak for all my gaming needs and shared things like browsers, slack, etc.

      • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nzM
        4·
        10 months ago

        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.

        • hackeryarn@lemmy.worldOP
          3·
          10 months ago

          Yeah that’s totally fair. It’s definitely far from perfect. Although, I do like that it provides at least some level of isolation.

        • tony@lemmy.hoyle.me.uk
          3·
          10 months ago

          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.