Which distro/image to use for distrobox where you just want to install tools?

Linux@lemmy.ml – 41 points – 7 months ago

The immutable state of distros like fedora silerblue and opensuse microos leads to the use of distrobox.

I defaulted to a fedora image but there must be better images for the job. What do you suggest to use if you just want to install pdflatex, pandoc, R, julia, python, ffmpeg, etc. Just the usual tools you need for the tasks everyday

I'd recommend debian - the universal operating system.

If your software does not exist for debian, your software does not exist. (Ubuntu is just debian with extra corpo flavour)

It's been a while since I've used pure debian, but historically I've used Ubuntu because debian made it more difficult to install "non-free" software. Has this changed?

Yes, you just have to change a file, apt update and you're good to go. https://wiki.debian.org/SourcesList#Using__a_text_editor (you probably want to add contrib, non-free and non-free-firmware)

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One year ago I treated how long it takes to get Gimp to install on various distros in distrobox:

Results:

zypper@Tumbleweed: 3 minutes, 22 seconds

apt@Ubuntu 22.04: 1 minute 26 seconds

dnf@Fedora: 1 minute 2 seconds

pacman@arch: 0 minutes 21 seconds

But that's just installation speed. It simply shows that there are quite big differences depending on use case.

For everyday tasks, I think a Fedora distrobox works fine, but you would have to upgrade it eventually and I admit I'm not sure how you do that under distrobox. Still, I initially used it and still have a Fedora distrobox I use for doing stuff for my job, as well as one I use for running a game modding program that requires Java, and they both work fine.

I've also had success with a Debian distrobox, which I used to compile Render96ex. Debian is pretty universal, so it's much easier to follow compile instructions using it than a Fedora distrobox ^^'

https://github.com/ublue-os/boxkit#boxkit-alpine-example