Distrobox is the single piece of software that completely changed the way I work. If you’ve hear of or used Vagrant and thought it was a great idea but implemented in a really heavy handed manner, then Distrobox is exactly what you’ve been looking for.
Within a month Distrobox became my primary dev environment and that hasn’t changed for over a year. In this post I hope to share how I use Distrobox and give you some tips for making the experience even better.
Doesn’t nix do all of this without containers?
I think so but this method does remove the quite significant barrier of having to figure out nix’s language and quirks, so I’d argue there’s merit to the workflow. Still, you’re trading it for containerization know-how, so not necessarily the best choice.
Yeah it does. I actually use nix as my base OS on one machine. But when I need to work on a project that will never be packaged with nix, and I need all the dependencies, it really becomes impossible to just use nix.
Nix makes an amazing bas OS, however.