The Distrobox 1.3 toolkit has been released, allowing you to quickly install and run any Linux distribution in a container and ensure its integration with the main system. The project code is written in Shell and distributed under the GPLv3 license.
The project is implemented as an add-on over the Docker or Podman toolkit, and is distinguished by the maximum simplification of work and setting up the integration of the running environment with the rest of the system. To create an environment with a different distribution, it is enough to issue a single distrobox-create command, without thinking about the subtleties. After launch, Distrobox forwards the user's home directory to the container, configures access to the X11 and Wayland server to execute from the container of graphical applications, allows you to connect external drives, adds sound output, implements integration at the level of SSH agent, D-Bus and udev.
As a result, the user can fully work in another distribution without leaving the main system. Distrobox claims to be able to host 16 distributions, including Alpine, Manjaro, Gentoo, EndlessOS, NixOS, Void, Arch, SUSE, Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, and Fedora. Any distribution kit for which there are images in the OCI format can be launched in the container.
Among the main areas of application are experiments with atomically updated distributions, such as Endless OS, Fedora Silverblue, OpenSUSE MicroOS and SteamOS3, the creation of separate isolated environments (for example, to run home configuration on a work laptop), access to more recent versions of applications from experimental branches of distributions .
The new release adds the distrobox-host-exec command to run commands from a container running in the host environment. Added support for microdnf toolkit. Implemented support for containers running as root (rootful). Extended distribution support (Fedora-Toolbox 36, openSUSE 15.4-beta, AlmaLinux 9, Gentoo, ostree-based systems). Improved integration with the system environment, for example, synchronization of time zone settings, dns and /etc/hosts is implemented.
Source: opennet.ru