I am freaking out on how well distrobox is working for me. I buy a lot of games on itch.io and GOG, and neither have a flatpak. However, installing an Ubuntu container (max compatibility) and launching games from there just works. Okay, I have yet to install a GOG game, but it the Itch client works then what won’t?
I am so excited. Containers are so fun. I guess arch would be easier, but whatevs.
I cannot wait to get home and try it out!
Please consider reporting back after you’ve tried it; I’d love to read your experiences.
Also, what is nice about this somewhat failed experiment is that it was easy to just rm the container and everything went with it.
Yeah, I am not going back to regular linux.
Yup, it’s absolutely lovely. Did you experiment with a custom home directory for your distrobox yet?
So it turns out, I cannot use my NVIDIA card using distrobox. I guess it only works with AMD?
Anyways, gaming using Bazzite is a dead end for me. I still find Fedora Silverblue super fun to use, and I think I will just run Steam + Lutris using Flatpaks. I was wondering if distrobox would somehow allow better performance, but I don’t understand the technology well enough to even make those presumption. I see that this image is used a lot on Steam Deck, which I also don’t understand why (as opposed to having everything native).
Anyways, I can still game well on Silverblue. Baldur’s Gate 3 runs okay. So, that means I am fine, hah!
The only gripe I have, which is just my stupidity, is that I have way of using Mozilla VPN. I tried to run it on an Ubuntu container, but I must be doing something wrong because it does not launch. Maybe I need to look into podman more closely, or maybe I am missing some graphical dependencies that is assumed to exist on a DE. I shall keep trying.
Thank you for reporting back! Much appreciated!
So it turns out, I cannot use my NVIDIA card using distrobox. I guess it only works with AMD?
Interesting. Unfortunately, I don’t own an Nvidia device. Therefore, I can’t tackle it myself. Distrobox should allow the use of Nvidia, but I’m unaware if this applies to the bazzite-arch container as well. The picture you shared and the link to its FAQ-page (found below) do suggest otherwise, unfortunately…
I was wondering if distrobox would somehow allow better performance
FWIW, I’ve always experienced better performance inside the bazzite-arch distrobox container, at least compared to Flatpak*.
I see that this image is used a lot on Steam Deck, which I also don’t understand why (as opposed to having everything native).
Because the distro image it’s used in conjunction with, Bazzite, is Fedora-based, while Steam OS is based on Arch. Bazzite is Fedora-based in the first place, because Arch doesn’t officially have any plans for ‘immutable’ distros yet. As for the remaining distros, only Fedora and NixOS (see Jovian-NixOS) have a sufficiently mature and suitable platform at this point in time.
maybe I am missing some graphical dependencies
This happens way more often than you might expect. Even the so-called ‘toolbox’ containers from Distrobox miss a lot of packages required to support software graphically. Consider running it inside a terminal and pay attention to error codes etc; those might/should help you resolve the issue. Sometimes it helps to explicitly use the -v or --verbose option to ensure that the program actually communicates what’s happening.
Thank you for your feedback! I am learning a lot. This is the first time I have run into issues where I was not tempted to abandon ship and go back to what works. I actually care about this system and want it to succeed. I think this is a super cool path forward.
The only other time I felt this interested in a new paradigm of linux was GoboLinux with its compartmentalized installation of programs, so you can have every version you need, but I got confused with the recipe system and I don’t know if it is still active.
One problem I had is that I was trying to download an image for linux mint, because it gives me access to PPAs without needing to use SNAP due to Ubuntu, but I could not get an image to download, no matter what combination of linux + mint + version I used. I finally realized I could search podman, now I can go forward!
Concerning Baldur’s Gate, are you using Wayland or X11? For me Wayland was much smoother than X11.
