Distrobox Adds Support For ChromeOS - Allowing More Linux Apps To Run On Chromebooks

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Distrobox Adds Support For ChromeOS - Allowing More Linux Apps To Run On Chromebooks

Distrobox as the open-source project allowing easy access to running other distributions/apps via Podman and Docker has merged support for ChromeOS...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Distrobox-Adds-ChromeOS

[Andreas]

Very nice. Distrobox is amazing, although I have a few gripes preventing me from using it on my own machine: I have a 13 inch 4K laptop screen, and while the applications scale correctly, the cursor becomes tiny. Furthermore, I haven't yet found a way to share my themes with the Distrobox. I'm not one for using custom themes, but I'd at least like to have my normal cursor, and I have no idea how that works. Perhaps someone here knows if these issues can be resolved? I'm using Ubuntu 22.04 with Wayland and 200% scaling.

[chromer]

Is it vice-versa too ? ChromeOS add support for Distrobox natively ?

Or we should run Distrobox from Chrome OS's penguin ?

[ecurtin]

It's Distrobox from Chrome OS's penguin, this makes more sense in ChromeOS, bare-metal doesn't make sense as of today as ChromeOS isn't designed to install apps bare metal, Android apps also run via crosvm, like penguin apps do. Now that doesn't mean you lose performance necessarily, ChromeOS is designed to run containers/vm encapsulated apps with native speed. The Linux ecosystem is going that way in general, running as man apps as possible in containers.

[ecurtin]

*as many apps as possible

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Definitely one of my favorite new projects of the last several years. It's interesting that someone from RH is contributing, even if it's off-the-clock. Even on Fedora I ditch Toolbox for Distrobox. It also sounded like this was going to be the solution used in OpenSUSE ALP.

[uid313]

Now lets hope we see some good Chromebooks getting released, I hope Google makes a new Chromebook.
There needs to be a ARM-based Chromebook with like 16 GB RAM and 512 GB storage.

[Tian]

Is the support to the real Chrome OS or to crostini only?

[Quackdoc]

Is the support to the real Chrome OS or to crostini only?

crostini I believe, still good, but not great

[emblemparade]

I love Distrobox so much. I realize it addresses rather niche use cases, but for some of it's a real lifesaver. It smooths away so many of the pain points resulting from the necessity of choosing one Linux distro (and version) while living in a world of many. And even if you're working in the same distro, it's just such a quick and easy way to containerize apps and experiments and tests and PoCs. Technologically, it doesn't add much beyond Podman and Docker. But the opinionated UX is what makes it such a pleasure. Pick a distro and just create an instance. Voila.

Thank you, Luca Di Maio, for your work on it from a huge fan!