The mass of distributions and package managers is soothing to the soul but requires extra effort. You may not use anything but the vanilla stuff that comes bundled with your distribution, but if you’re on the look out for something extra, or want to develop using a strict development environment, you can use Distrobox.
Distrobox runs containers as though they are part of your system, making it easy to mix and match without messing up stability. If you have tried Docker or Podman, you will be familiar with the idea of containers. If not, where have you been for the last decade? So here’s an introduction to the setup and use of Distrobox, to help you decide if it is for you or not!
OUR EXPERT
Mats Tage Axelsson uses Linux every day for longer than is socially acceptable among most people. This leads to a deep knowledge of Linux. And loneliness.
Open the box!
The designers describe Distrobox as “a fancy wrapper around Podman or Docker”. When you run Docker or Podman, you must set your image to communicate with the host system, and these settings are from a security perspective.
Handling these settings is complicated and essential to get right for web-facing servers. When you use it as a second source of packages, only for local use, you can drop your guard a little. With Distrobox, all the settings are done by the tool.
On your own PC, your containers have access to your home directory. This is the biggest point of running Distrobox: all containers run with the same user and user directories. This is very convenient for your own PC but this is not how you should run containers serving the public internet.
It can be hard to use applications in containers, because security is paramount. On your PC, though, you can do more things, especially with This means you can use an application from
