Distrobox is software which creates and manages container-based development environments without root privileges. It lets you run a wide range of Linux distributions on a single host system.
It’s not reinventing the wheel. Distrobox is merely a rather sophisticated wrapper around Podman or Docker. Podman is a daemonless tool designed to find, run, build, share and deploy applications using containers and container images. Docker is a set of platform as a service products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers.
What’s a container? A container is an operating-system-level virtualization method for running multiple isolated Linux systems on a control host using a single Linux kernel.
Distrobox integrates these containers within your host system. Among other things, this means you share the HOME directory of the user, external storage, graphical apps (X11/Wayland), audio, systemd journal, even down to things like aliases in your shell. This is a real time-saver from a configuration perspective.
This article picks some useful tools to help you manage Distrobox containers.
Here’s our verdict captured in a legendary LinuxLinks-style ratings chart. Only free and open source software is eligible for inclusion here.
Click the links in the table below to learn more about each tool.
| Distrobox GUI Tools | |
|---|---|
| Atoms | Manage Linux Chroot(s) and Containers |
| DistroShelf | GTK Client for Distrobox |
| BoxBuddy | Graphical manager for Distrobox |
| Kontainer | User-friendly way to manage Distrobox containers built with KDE Kirigami |
| DistroRack | Qt/QML-based GUI for Distrobox containers |
This article has been updated to reflect the changes outlined in our recent announcement.
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