What would be the correct and ideally maintenance-free way to use apps installed in distrobox so that the container and software inside never reaches EOL?
I haven’t used this tool for long enough, but it seems to me, that the automatic distrobox upgrade only updates packages for the installed distro version (unsurprisingly) but does not perform full distro upgrade when a new version comes along (at least that did not happen when I tried installing fedora:40 and then ran the upgrade).
Should one use a rolling distro for an “eternal box of the spotless user experience”? Or does the :latest tag behave differently than when I selected a specific version? Something else I might be missing or overlooking?
Rolling distros would work as you’d hope. I don’t think distrobox-upgrade will ever upgrade you to the latest version of the container image, just the packages within that version, even with the :latest tag.
However, what you can do is use distrobox-assemble. This lets you write a file that automates the configuration of one of your distrobox containers and easily rebuild them. If you set this to the :latest tag, you can re-assemble your container to automatically rebuild your container against the newest version.
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@ppb This is exactly what I do.
I periodically recreate my distroboxen to reclaim disk space used for stuff I no longer need (because I moved on to different projects); get security updates for base images and installed software.
Recreating my distroboxen takes only a few minutes.
I wrote some tools to help with that process and published them here: