Debian Distrobox for non-fedora-native apps?

Has anyone here gotten Distrobox to properly get a debian arm or ubuntu arm container up and running? Most of what I do can be done in Fedora, but I would prefer to also have apps like signal and discord installed. I’ve mostly given up on discord, as I haven’t had any success in getting an arm-native nor third party version of the client running on Asahi thus far.

Regarding Signal, I haven’t done much research yet. Is there an arm build available for Debian or Ubuntu if I were to create a distrobox? Per the asciinema recording of my terminal below, I haven’t had any luck in getting arch nor debian running in distrobox yet.
https://asciinema.org/a/4g42PeoSqTn0m4wG3ZEPNSuvY

Looks like Debian has official arm64 Docker images: arm64v8/debian - Docker Image

You should be able to use that with Distrobox.

And in fact, because debian - Official Image | Docker Hub is multi-arch, you can just use the normal tags.

So e.g.:

distrobox create --name debian-stable --image docker.io/library/debian:stable
distrobox enter debian-stable

Works for me on Fedora Asahi Remix 42.

These other architectures are included under the non-prefixed images via OCI “image indexes”), such that, for example, docker run hello-world should run as-is on all supported platforms.

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Have you tried using Legcord? They have an arm version for fedora and it’s recommended to be used in the Fedora Asahi User Guide as a replacement for the discord client. I can affirm it works for me.

Another reason for the distrobox would be to run x86 apps like signal or other classic desktop apps that don’t have arm builds yet

I have been running Vesktop as a Discord client and Gurk as a Signal client on my Fedora Asahi Remix Mac, with no issues. Even did a video meeting on Vesktop recently. It seems identical to the regular Discord app as far as I can tell, except that its app icon is really ugly (to my eye). Gurk runs as a TUI. Both have been rock solid. I may try the Distrobox solution, though. Could come in handy.

just wanted to chime in and mention other ways to get Signal-desktop on arm
There is a snap maintained by Snapcrafters that supports it:

There is also a signal-desktop package on the Terra repository which you can add

I’ve tried both and they work fine. Of course these are community builds and you’ll have to trust that they didn’t change anything before building. But that’s your decision.

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