Today I discovered Distrobox and it saved my day by letting me install an old-ass, unmaintained app that's only packaged for old Debian

Huge shootout to the Distrobox devs, you saved my day :)

I brew beer as a hobby. I've been using Joliebulle 3 for close to 10 years because it's FOSS and super simple to use, and I'm too lazy to switch to another brewing app. It's been unmaintained for almost 5 years, but it wonderfully does exactly what I want from a brewing software. I was missing this crucial "piece of equipment" since I migrated to Fedora.

Brew day is tomorrow. I forgot to look into it until it was almost too late.

36 comments

This is one of those things that I'd come across and went "huh thats pretty cool" then promptly for got about, so this is a nice reminder about distrobox haha

I'll have to go back and mess with it, such a cool tool to have
- Same here. It's a great tool but I've never found a real-world situation where I actually need it.
I know you said you're too lazy to switch to a different brewing app, but you should really check out kleiner Brauhelfer
- That has to be the most German piece of software in existence
- Oh thanks, I'll check it out.
- There's also Brewtarget.
If you switch to Arch, this is waiting for you in AUR 😊.

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/joliebulle
- archarcharahrahchrahchrahchraharhahrahrarararararrar
What is Distrobox? Something for immutable OSes?
- From a user perspective, Distrobox is a tool that lets you "spin up any distro inside your terminal".
  
  You can basically create a mini Linux environment of any distro that you can access through the terminal. You can set it to share your home folder, our create a new home folder just for that mini environment.
  
  Behind the scenes Distrobox is creating and managing containers through Podman or Docker. You could technically achieve the same thing by manually setting up Podman containers, Distrobox just makes it very easy to create and maintain those containers with the correct permissions. It also has useful tools where you could install an app in a Distrobox container, but then add that app to your host OS app list.
  
  This makes it especially useful for immutable OSs. Instead of adding packages to your base OS, which should be kept as minimal as possible, you can just install them in a Distrobox, so your host's root filesystem is unaffected.
  
  I see! So a fancy chroot, if I understand you correctly.
- It's for anybody, incredible tool.
Can you run Wayland GUI apps in distrobox?
- Yes. I run VS Code in an Ubuntu distrobox, with the electron wayland flags. Works real nice. KDE Wayland btw.
  
  VSCode is an electron application, right? Electron apps use xwindow (or xwayland) unless you launched them with certain flags. I'm interested to know if native Wayland app actually works. Or is it possible that distrobox is actually use xwindow and pass everything to the host's xwayland process? Can't seem to find anything about it in the docs.
I daily drive Fedora Silverblue on my laptop and distrobox has been great.

I have layered only two packages: USB Guard and Distrobox. I run syncthing in a rootless podman container, and the rest goes through Distrobox.

I was even able to setup ProtonVPN in distrobox and it functions as if it was directly installed on the host (just need to map your home folder and some permissions).

I hope that immutable becomes either the standard or at least all major distros start offering it as an alternative. Makes everything foolproof and makes me much more willing to try new packages and tools because I can always just roll back.

The only thing that would really make it perfect is if files in /etc/ where also handled in a similar manner. IE: Can make changes to configuration files, and easily roll back to defaults at any time.
- I run zfs on my (two) Debian boxes (a thinkpad x1 and a home server). Installing it as the root filesystem was a bit tricky but once it’s done it has been flawless for me. I run the server using 2 ssd in mirror for /etc and all those, and then a couple disks in raidz for data. When one of the root disks died I just swapped it and re synced and was up and running in not time. Unfortunately the laptop only has a single ssd so if that dies I have to reinstall and restore from a backup.
  
  The cool thing is that I can just take a snapshot before messing around and the restore if anything breaks. It has been a really nice experience and I recommend it! I know it’s not the same as an immutable distro, and I tried silverblue but it’s too different from what I’m used to :-)
  
  Silverblue + ZFS would be a match made in heaven, unfortunately Fedora makes it really hard to do ZFS reliably, too many kernel updates that break ZFS. This would be an even bigger nightmare on Silverblue given the distribution model.
  
  If only ZFS was part of the Linux kernel 😑. maybe one day
Just a quick plug that openSUSE Aeon has Distrobox out of the box and works beautifully!
Does it not run on Fedora? You could probably use alien to convert the deb to an rpm. Or just unpack the tgz on github and run it: https://github.com/314r/joliebulle/releases/tag/3.7.3

It looks like there's also a version 4 that's still FOSS that I assume would be targeted to new platforms. But I only know enough French to get the gist of their site, I don't know the more technical words to figure out what's changed.
- I tried running the tgz a few months ago. It needed a shitload of deprecated python dependancies, I'm not well versed in python so after the 10th pip install I gave up.
  
  Version 4 is unfortunately closed source and paid.
  
  This says it's free and 90% MIT license, doesn't it? https://joliebulle.org/opensource
- You could probably use alien to convert the deb to an rpm. Or just unpack the tgz on github and run it: https://github.com/314r/joliebulle/releases/tag/3.7.3
  
  Or just use toolbox.
- I had a quick look at the PKGSRC on AUR. It uses QtWebKit which is the biggest stumbling block, given that most or perhaps even all distributions killed that for security reasons. I recently found out that an "AI and automation" company forked and revived QtWebKit, so there is a tiny chance distros will package it again but don't hold your breath. There was a promising fork once and I'd guess there will be an attitude by packagers that they've fallen for a fork before and that never got off the ground.
Whatcha brewing? I'm about to transfer my first lager using novalager to the secondary. Got pretty good attenuation and may have gone overboard with the whirlpool hops lol
- Today I'm making yet another variation of my witbier, this time with kweik and lemon balm.

36 comments