I have never heard of toolbx before, can anyone share how it compares to Distrobox? I've been using that for some time.
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
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Its faster and more minimal.
For desktop use poorly it doesnt have the ability to use custom home dirs so dotfiles will conflict
I see, I only use distrobox for building software that doesn't easily run on NixOS, so that likely shouldn't matter too much for me.
Its mostly used for servers so that a GPU can be easily used with containerized software.
Most of these use cases don't even have a display output.
From what I gather, it's very similar. They're both containerization tools to install software in a container overlay (someone mentioned to me before that they both even draw from the same Docker images).
Toolbx environments have seamless access to the user’s home directory, the Wayland and X11 sockets, networking (including Avahi), removable devices (like USB sticks), systemd journal, SSH agent, D-Bus, ulimits, /dev and the udev database, etc..
I'm not familiar with the finer details, but here's some example use cases.
ETA: Based on the examples, it reminds me of how NixOS uses nested shells to do things.
From what I gather, it’s very similar.
They are both just wrappers for podman(/docker). Distrobox is more feature rich, and is far better documented, but is closer to a collection of bash scripts rather than a fully cohesive program. Toolbx is… definitely something. Their only real claim to fame is being less “janky”? IDK, it reeks of NIH, and in my experience, it’s a lot more fragile than distrobox (as in, I’ve had containers just become randomly inoperable in that I can’t enter them after a bit).
If you want to be pedantic, technically, distrobox is a fork of toolbx before it was rewritten.