Using Distrobox To Augment The Package Selection On Clear Linux, Other Distributions

While our testing has consistently shown how Clear Linux can deliver leading performance on Intel/AMD x86_64 platforms, one of the user criticisms to that distribution has been around the limited selection of packaged software especially on the desktop side. But the rather interesting Distrobox can help address that by leveraging Podman or Docker to run other Linux distribution user-space software packages atop.

Distrobox is an open-source project that builds off Podman or Docker to create containers of different Linux distributions. These Distrobox'ed containers are tightly integrated with the host for sharing the user's home directory, X11 / Wayland GUI app support, audio, and other connectivity.

Check out Distrobox on GitHub if not familiar with this project for tightly-integrated, desktop-oriented containers.

Jorge Castro has written a blog post on ClearLinux.org noting how Distrobox can be used for efficiently augmenting the package selection on Clear Linux by this means of leveraging other distributions' user-space components. The Distrobox solution obviously isn't limited to use on Intel's Linux distribution but obviously an interesting use-case and would be fun to see how well it performs thanks to Clear's optimizations compared to the different distributions on the same bare metal system.