Today I discovered Distrobox and it saved my day by letting me install an old-ass, unmaintained app that's only packaged for old Debian
Huge shootout to the Distrobox devs, you saved my day :)
I brew beer as a hobby. I've been using Joliebulle 3 for close to 10 years because it's FOSS and super simple to use, and I'm too lazy to switch to another brewing app. It's been unmaintained for almost 5 years, but it wonderfully does exactly what I want from a brewing software. I was missing this crucial "piece of equipment" since I migrated to Fedora.
Brew day is tomorrow. I forgot to look into it until it was almost too late.
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What is Distrobox? Something for immutable OSes?
From a user perspective, Distrobox is a tool that lets you "spin up any distro inside your terminal".
You can basically create a mini Linux environment of any distro that you can access through the terminal. You can set it to share your home folder, our create a new home folder just for that mini environment.
Behind the scenes Distrobox is creating and managing containers through Podman or Docker. You could technically achieve the same thing by manually setting up Podman containers, Distrobox just makes it very easy to create and maintain those containers with the correct permissions. It also has useful tools where you could install an app in a Distrobox container, but then add that app to your host OS app list.
This makes it especially useful for immutable OSs. Instead of adding packages to your base OS, which should be kept as minimal as possible, you can just install them in a Distrobox, so your host's root filesystem is unaffected.
I see! So a fancy chroot, if I understand you correctly.
In a way, but chroot only isolates file systems (process only has access to an isolated "root" which isn't the actual host's root). Rootless Podman/Docker goes a few steps beyond and utilizes cgroups, and user namespaces to isolate not only file systems, but also processes and networking.
Here is a high level overview.
And another one from Dan Walsh.
It's for anybody, incredible tool.