When containers were first introduced just over a decade ago, they were seen primarily as a server application. However, in the past few years, containers have been increasingly finding their way onto the desktop where they function like applications such as chroot and Gnome Boxes. Containers can also be used to dual-boot distributions and releases, as well as for sandboxing. Their advantage is that they integrate seamlessly with the host distribution's hardware and require less memory than their alternatives. Among the choices for managing containers in this way, Distrobox is by far the most popular [1]. Although only a few years old, Distrobox is rapidly spreading across distributions. Running from a user account, Distrobox integrates with the host, letting it share the HOME directory, external storage, external USB devices, audio, and both X11 and Wayland support.

Distrobox originated in Fedora, specifically in its predecessor Toolbx in Fedora Silverblue. However, Distrobox is now available in an increasing number of distributions [2], although there may be a delay before the newest releases are available. Today, only a few visible signs of its origin remain, such as when you try to create a container for an unsupported distribution version and Distrobox offers to try to create an image from Fedora. Distrobox's GitHub page shows a project in rapid development with a growing number of contributors.

Distrobox can be built from source with either Podman 2.1.0 or later, or Docker 18.06.1 or later. Although it searches out an appropriate image automatically, you can also create a container with an image of your choice, but the main man page warns that stripped-down images may be missing some basic commands. In particular, images used with Distrobox should include basic utilities such as mount, and basic management utilities such as usermod, passwd, and sudo. Tools like vi and less are also useful. In addition, guest operating systems are limited to Linux, and some early releases may have unsupported dependencies. Similarly, you may need to supply your own images for the newest releases of supported distributions. Recent long-term support (LTS) releases may be the best choice in many circumstances. For custom setups, the project's GitHub site offers useful tips [3].

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