The latest version of Distrobox 1.8 has been released, offering users the ability to easily install and run any Linux distribution in a container and seamlessly integrate it with the main system. Written in Shell, the project is distributed under the gplv3 license.
Distrobox serves as a layer over Docker, Podman or Lilipod, simplifying the process of setting up and connecting the isolated environment to the host system. With just one command, Distrobox-Create, users can create an environment with a different distribution without worrying about the complexities. Once launched, Distrobox provides access to the user’s home directory from within the container, enables X11 and Wayland server access for running graphical applications, supports external drives, sound output, and integration at the SSH agent, d-Bus, and UDEV levels.
Currently, Distrobox supports 26 host distributions, such as Alpine, Manjaro, Gentoo, Endless OS, NixOS, VOID, Arch, Suse, Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, and Fedora. Users can run containers with any distribution that offers images in OCI format, allowing them to work seamlessly within a different distribution without leaving their main system.
Key applications of Distrobox include experimenting with atomic distributions like Endless OS, Fedora Silverblue, OpenSUSE MicroOS, and SteamOS, creating isolated environments for specific tasks, and testing experimental branches of distributions.
Updates in the latest release include improved integration with NVIDIA GPU, enhanced control over environment variables xdg_data_dirs and xdg_data_home, the ability to specify external configuration files (manifests) for the Distrobox Assemble command, and support for launching containers with Universal Blue and ToolbX-Images. Additionally, the latest version offers support for new releases of Fedora, Ubuntu, Alpine, and