Distrobox 1.6 Released For Easily Launching New Distros Within Your Terminal

[risho]

No GUI? The use of the word "easy/easily" (etc) is sadly a little misplaced.

why would you need a gui to install a cli environment? if you can't run 1 simple command to setup a container then how do you ever plan on actually using the container itself?

[Delgarde]

If a GUI is necessary for something to be easy for you, this speaks less about how the word easy is used and more about your aversion to CLI tooling. I myself find CLI tools way easier to deal with then GUI tools. does that make gui tools not easy? no. thats stupid.

Of late, I've been getting a lot of mileage out of terminal-based UIs (TUI, not CLI) for a few scenarios. Lazygit is a fantastic Git client... vastly more powerful than any GUI client I've ever used (either in an IDE or standalone), while exposing that power in a much more usable form than the notoriously difficult Git CLI. And while I've used it less, the same guy also has Lazydocker for container management.

[emblemparade]

Such a great project! Luca Di Maio is a very practical and productive developer. The Lilipod idea is excellent: in so many cases we don't need something as elaborate as even Podman. Just let me get something done quickly without fuss and dependencies, thank you.

I've come to call these the Distrobox instances "pristine containers". The Docker baggage has made us think of containers as packaged applications. But they don't have to be -- they can be super duper lightweight virtual machines, starting from scratch. Here's a container, it's just the base OS. Now you install whatever you need on it. Pristine.

Distrobox basically does what Canonical's LXD does, but on a lower non-cloud level.

Any serious and practically-minded Linux user should use Distrobox.

[slalomsk8er]

Distrobox basically does what Canonical's LXD does, but on a lower non-cloud level.

Any serious and practically-minded Linux user should use Distrobox.

Last time I used LXD/incus I didn't need any cloud level. Not sure if it's still optional but it worked like a charm as I was following a tutorial and the writer used it to make sure to abstract away the "it works for me" problems.

Still not found the problem I would like to solve with it but I will keep it in mind and maybe find one soon.

[Quackdoc]

Of late, I've been getting a lot of mileage out of terminal-based UIs (TUI, not CLI) for a few scenarios. Lazygit is a fantastic Git client... vastly more powerful than any GUI client I've ever used (either in an IDE or standalone), while exposing that power in a much more usable form than the notoriously difficult Git CLI. And while I've used it less, the same guy also has Lazydocker for container management.

I've been using more and more tui based software too, I'll have to check out lazygit, currently I use gitui and it's... fine. quick question though, can it work with github by chance? at least to the extent of saving the token? because that's a right PITA for me

[Delgarde]

I've been using more and more tui based software too, I'll have to check out lazygit, currently I use gitui and it's... fine. quick question though, can it work with github by chance? at least to the extent of saving the token? because that's a right PITA for me

I don't know, since I use it mostly at work, where it's all SSH keys for authentication. But the features I'm mostly interested in are things like interactive staging (or discarding) of individual lines of changes, rewriting history to re-order or squash commits, cherry-picking between branches, etc... stuff that's just painful to do with the Git CLI, and either impossible or cumbersome to do with any of the GUIs I've used.

E.g. you ever find when reviewing your changes that you accidentally staged a change — several commits ago — which wasn't supposed to be committed? I found out recently that Lazygit let me browse back to the commit which contained the unwanted change and discard the unwanted fragment of debug code, automatically rewriting that commit and rebasing all the later ones on top of it. And I can do that with the Git CLI (probably by manually undoing the change, committing the fix, then rebasing to squash the fix into the original commit)... but it would have taken half an hour instead of a few seconds.

[Quackdoc]

E.g. you ever find when reviewing your changes that you accidentally staged a change — several commits ago — which wasn't supposed to be committed? I found out recently that Lazygit let me browse back to the commit which contained the unwanted change and discard the unwanted fragment of debug code, automatically rewriting that commit and rebasing all the later ones on top of it. And I can do that with the Git CLI (probably by manually undoing the change, committing the fix, then rebasing to squash the fix into the original commit)... but it would have taken half an hour instead of a few seconds.

well im sold on this now, I've hit that exact problem a couple times Ill be downloading this tonight lol

[ezst036]

If a GUI is necessary for something to be easy for you, this speaks less about how the word easy is used and more about your aversion to CLI tooling. I myself find CLI tools way easier to deal with then GUI tools. does that make gui tools not easy? no. thats stupid.

Realistically this is a one way street. Even the most average GUI is more user friendly than potentially the best CLIs ever written.

The simple fact is that nobody can ever remember all of those different commands, flags, etc,. who isn't a hard core computer user. GUIs really are an "everybody else" consideration that is a synonym for easy. It just is. The GUI world is easier. You have to find truely terribly constructed GUIs for this to not be the case, and I do mean, quite possibly the worst in a class of their own ever.

[Quackdoc]

Realistically this is a one way street. Even the most average GUI is more user friendly than potentially the best CLIs ever written.

The simple fact is that nobody can ever remember all of those different commands, flags, etc,. who isn't a hard core computer user. GUIs really are an "everybody else" consideration that is a synonym for easy. It just is. The GUI world is easier. You have to find truely terribly constructed GUIs for this to not be the case, and I do mean, quite possibly the worst in a class of their own ever.

This literally isn't true at all. for some people sure. but there are a lot of people out there who greatly prefer CLI, whether it's visual impairments, cognitive impairments, or people like me who simply need to have way too many windows open, a GUI is a bad option.

not to mention there is a certain complexity threshold where a gui is simply not an option for a good app. There is not a single good ffmpeg gui for instance. no good VS GUI, no good qemu GUI, no matter how hard virt-manager wants to pretend it is. etc. a GUI is not synonym for easy, It's a synonym for simple. One ought to try hard not to conflate the two because when a GUI's limitations strike, they strike hard, and end up breaking usage, not exactly "easy" then.