Frustrated by an app’s absent or lagging support for your preferred distro? Like magic, Distrobox runs applications from different Linux distributions right on your Linux computer. They’re running on your computer, yet they’re in their own native distribution. We show you how it works.
Containers are a form of virtual machine. A traditional virtual machine has a complete installation of an operating system inside it. Often, they’ll have a desktop environment too, and you can use them just as though they were a physical computer.
A container, on the other hand, only contains the minimum amount of operating system and tools to run the programs that the container is dedicated to supporting.
Because containers are lightweight and computationally cheaper than traditional virtual machines, they can be launched very quickly and controlled programmatically. Scripts can control their creation, use, shut-down, and removal. This makes them ideal for such things as development and test environments, and providing automatic scalability for cloud-based services.
Just as they are with virtual machines, the applications inside containers are isolated from the host system. That’s a good thing in most scenarios, but it’s a showstopper if you want to use a program that’s installed inside a container as though it’s installed on your own physical computer.
