This is a neat write up, but I'm curious what gaming inside a Distrobox container would be like. For starters, is there any performance impact or potential glitches like screen tearing, and second, could I say, install a more recent mesa package in the container (assuming this is Fedora Silverblue), and have the game use it?
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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That's a super interesting idea. I will have to give that a shot!
Right now I just use flatpak for all my gaming needs and shared things like browsers, slack, etc.
My issue with flatpaks is that having too many flatpaks becomes a chore to manage. I did not have a fun time with Steam in a flatpak (required some mucking around to get the DPI and cursor size right) and same with Chromium a while back (took me a long time to figure out how to pass on the flags to enable Wayland support). IMO, having a single container (or a container for a particular activity, like gaming) would be a much more cleaner approach, while offering the flexibility akin to a mutable OS (so no weird flatpak quirks to deal with.. in theory). This would also make things like backups easier, I could just save my "gaming" container to one tar and not worry about whether I missed any dependencies etc.
If that is your ideal setup, then I think VanillaOS and its apx package manager might be of interest to you.
That's pretty much what I do, spin up a container for anything I need to do and everything is within that.. once I've finished I blow the container away and all the dependencies go with it. Currently use proxmox as a frontend for that although I ran on the command line for ages before switching to a beefier server.
I do the same with docker - nest it in a container so everything is together (and also so it can't screw around with the host networking). eg. my lemmy container has the lemmy docker and its dependencies together.
Yeah that's totally fair. It's definitely far from perfect. Although, I do like that it provides at least some level of isolation.
I don't really get the comparison to vagrant. It doesn't seem like it feels the same role? Can distro box be used to share environments with other developers or used in CI/CD processes?
I use it to share environments with a small team. Just have distrobox specific Docker files and we can all spin up the same distrobox environment locally.
We end up having a different base docker file (e.g. our distrobox one has editors and stuff), but we all share the same project specific docker file. That same project specific file gets used in CI/CD and deployment, but with a minimal base. So all in all, I would say it's even better than Vagrant because we run the same system in production.