Cool app alert! This looks really nice, would some of you mind kicking the tyres? It’d be nice to know how it holds up to people’s workflows!
GitHub - ranfdev/DistroShelf: gtk4 client for https://distrobox.it (please remember to star this thing!)
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I’m a noob at distrobox but my mini review:
Seems identical to BoxBuddy. Does it add features or significantly different in someway?
Same to me. The only thing the app can do more is that you can also manage exported apps. Plus, it looks a bit more colorful. 
If it has custom home directories for cloned boxes, I‘m sold.
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It sadly doesn’t, and cloning in fact does not work at all. Damn.
No idea what caused the error, as “Some(1)” is not quite the most informative error message. I’ll try to find logs. Can’t seem to find any info in the app nor files in .var (dunno if that’s the right place to look though). Oh, right, flatpak run.
I do prefer the UI though!
It’s pretty rough around the edges for sure. When you delete a box, you still see its UI. Disappeared after restarting the app.
Thanks for filing an issue, I filed one and the author fixed it and pushed a new version to flathub right away!
Kyle put it in the bazzite testing branch so we’re interested in checking it out as a distrobox gui
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Is there no qt-based or other non-gtk/libadwaita distrobox GUI app?
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Btw does this include Distrobox itself? If it is, then I’d just direct people to this, instead of Distrobox + BoxBuddy, less setup, no opening terminal.
Distrobox is already installed inside operating system image. BoxBuddy and DistroShelf are flatpacks GUI applications installed in “userland”.
You have three options:
- work directly with Distrobox using commands in terminal or
- use BoxBuddy or
- use DistroShelf.
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I meant that, if you install DistroShelf on another distro, do you still need to provide Distrobox yourself or is already included in DistroShelf flatpak?
DistroShelf or BoxBuddy are GUI tools and on Blufin installed as flatpaks. You need to separately install Distrobox and also Podman (or Docker). In Blufin Podman and Distrobox are already installed in system image.
How is it on some other distribution? Usually this lower level tools are not preinstalled (like there are on Blufin) and you need to install them separately. But… it should not be too hard to do it like: sudo apt install podman distrobox or sudo dnf install podman distrobox or similar, it depends on Linux distro.
You know, this is Universal Blue forum (with Blufin, Aurora, Bazzite and uCore), and questions related to some other Linux distribution is better to be asked on that specific Linux distribution forum.
Schema is like this:
Thanks.
I do know how it works. I was just wondering because some stuff like guiscrcpy includes scrcpy in their flatpak, Bottles can retrieve their dependencies separately, and flatpak Lutris can still install and interface with flatpak emulators.
I was curious and looked up DistroShelf, but while BoxBuddy has texts pointing that you need to get Distrobox yourself, DistroShelf didn’t mention it. I first found DistroShelf here, didn’t see any GitHub Topics or Discord links on its GH page, so I decided to just ask here just in case people know about it (and the thread is in General section, and the post topic and first post is quite general with its context).
Also, could be relevant as well, because if it ships its own version then it would be duplication and might mean separate management of containers? I don’t know how containers works in the context of Flatpak, honestly.
In traditional Linux distribution everything is installed and blended together from system level program to user level programs. You can install DistroShelf as standard program that gets mixed with system itself.
But on immutable/atomic Linux distributions there is intentional separation between system level software and user level software. System level software is “immutable” and user level software should be installed using some container/sandbox technology. For GUI applications Blufin suggest to install as flatpaks. This is similar to mobile phone way of installing software.
I tried to explain how and why flatpaks are used in System Flatpak Runtimes EOL - #7 by red11.
My understanding of flatpaks is that by design they don’t have, nor can they obtain, escalated privileges that would allow them to use the host package manager to install distrobox, docker, etc.
Not specifying that you need distrobox is probably an omission/assumption on their part in their docs.
I know. I’ve been building my own images for two years.
For context: I was just asking for an “No, it doesn’t,” or “Yes, it does,” because I often recommend tools to people on Reddit. So I was just wondering if DistroShelf is an all-included solution or if I still need to link people to distrobox.it in addition to DistroShelf/BoxBuddy Flathub.
This is traditionally and strictly-speaking true, but there are edge cases. You can use flatpak-spawn --host to essentially break out of the sandbox, and is exactly what Lutris uses to install emulators via Flatpak. Additionally, traditionally “impossible to Flatpak apps” that’s been often criticized as a limitation of the format has become possible and shipped through Flathub; e.g. VPN apps and virt-manager.
I don’t know exactly what development happened to make those changes, could be new Portals or changes in Flathub moderators’ strictness for permission requests (I recall some complaints about that), but it happened and things changed. I wouldn’t be surprised if more traditionally CLI stuff with WebUI front-end eventually appears on Flathub, more than it already does.
Additionally, we DO know that both Distrobox and its Podman requirements can be installed completely sudo-lessly. So there is a possibility that much like guiscrcpy or SyncThingy it includes its requirement and manage it entirely in its own sandbox. It really wouldn’t be the first GUI tool on Flathub that includes its CLI tools to make it independent of system or user’s installation of said tool (I actually installed pdfchain to then use its pdftk via flatpak run net.sourceforge.pdfchain --command=pdftk or LibreOffice similarly for its pdf converter).
Anyways, this is getting off topic. I just wanted a “No it doesn’t” since it wasn’t 100% clear like with BoxBuddy.
TIL. Thanks for the info!
Actually, I‘m not even sure distrobox itself has that 