Desktop Environments

One of Distrobox's major attractions is its ability to run desktop environments such as Gnome or KDE Plasma in a container. Explaining how to do this would go well beyond the scope of this article, but there is a detailed description that you can check out on GitHub [9]. Please note that the dnf groupinstall command has been renamed to dnf group install.

You can create additional Docker, Podman, Lilipod, or LXC containers inside a Distrobox container. Android applications with Waydroid are also supported. The easiest way to do this is to use Vanilla OS, as explained in the documentation.

Even though operation is quite simple and involves just a few terminal commands, you may want a GUI. I would recommend the third-party BoxBuddy, which lists all the distributions installed in Distrobox, regardless of whether you installed them with BoxBuddy or directly in a terminal. Among other things, BoxBuddy lets you open the distributions in the terminal, shows installed applications, and integrates packages. Clicking Upgrade Box upgrades the respective distribution, while Clone Box (Figure 8) and Delete Box (Figure 9) do pretty much what it says on the label.

Figure 8: BoxBuddy is a simple GUI for Distrobox. It lists the installed distributions on the left and the commands that you can run against the selected distribution on the right.

Figure 9: BoxBuddy displays a list of distributions whose images you can set up in Distrobox by default. You can add further images from various sources at the command line or in BoxBuddy.

Conclusions and Outlook

Distrobox does not claim to reinvent the wheel; all of its functionality has already been implemented in many other ways. What Distrobox does do is make juggling containers child's play. The documentation [10] on the Distrobox website has a good level of detail. Once you familiarize yourself with the basics, I recommend taking an in-depth look at the Useful Tips section [11], which contains many more application scenarios.

In the long term, the intent is to introduce Cockpit [12] as a web-based GUI for Distrobox with a view to improving integration. The foundations for this have already been laid by the cockpit-podman [13] project on GitHub. This project expands the software's potential user base, taking it a step closer to the declared goal of replacing dual-boot and virtual machines in numerous scenarios.

Ubuntu steps out of line slightly here; it only started including Distrobox in its repos in version 23.04. If you are using an older version of Ubuntu, you will need to use the PPA [14]. BoxBuddy can currently only be installed directly via the AUR in Arch Linux, Manjaro, and NixOS, although the latest version 2.3.2 version is available on Flathub for all other Linux derivatives.