So I’m looking at trying am Immutable Linux Desktop (uBlue Aurora probably). One thing I’m not clear on is how to run GUI apps during development. From what I understand I should create a container with distrobox, install my toolchains in it and start developing. I’m used to containers for CLI and server work, but I’m not sure how it applies to the GUI (Wayland / KDE).
If I do a cargo run inside distrobox for a Rust GUI project will it just work?
I saw that I can ‘export’ apps, but that is for already built executables whereas I will be building and rebuilding them.
Dioxus desktop and fullstack worked out of the box. Bevy isn’t working because some Nvidia libraries aren’t in the container. I might need to switch to a different ‘GPU enabled’ image.
It should just work, distrobox supports graphical apps.
Spin up a VM with Aurora, and try to develop a simple GUI app in a distrobox yourself. See what it can do out of the box. I’ve been practicing getting a problematic VPN installed that way (on Bazzite), so that when I move to the bare metal version, I’ll be ready to go.
Also, if you’re unsure about distrobox, it’s just a wrapper for podman. If you need detailed settings beyond what distrobox can offer, you should look into podman’s options.
How did you go with the VPN? I will be looking at that next. I’m using Proton VPN which has an rpm package, but if that doesn’t work I can fallback to manually setting up the WireGuard config.
ProtonVPN actually has a flatpak, and it worked for me when I tested it out a couple months ago.
But my personal use case is with Private Internet Access. I basically had to install it from source, tweak the installer by commenting out some lines that tried to write to /usr (which is immutable), install and modify the systemd daemon service manually, then install the .desktop file for my local user. And for some reason, the OpenVPN tunnel doesn’t work, but WireGuard works fine.
I may try my hand at making a flatpak or RPM for a cleaner install, but it’s seriously made me reconsider if I want to keep this provider, move to one like AirVPN, or go with a different immutable distro like NixOS or openSUSE MicroOS.
If ProtonVPN has its package in the Fedora repos or as a downloadable RPM file, it should be as easy as rpm-ostree install protonvpn or rpm-ostree install /path/to/protonvpn.rpm.
Distrobox supports GUI Apps (XServer and Wayland)
