I'm a bit confused about all the package fomats that exist on Linux

…and wanted to start a short thread about your experiences.
What makes sense, what is possible, what has impact on the stability of your system? I don’t know (I have absolutely no clue), but in the past people often struggle with increased instability when their systems got bigger…

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On silverblue I usually take these steps in order. IMO it is “best-to-worst”, but there is no “proper” way to use a system.

  1. Flathub
  2. Fedora repos (I think almost everything here is on Flathub, but just in case.)
  3. Flathub-beta
  4. GNOME Nightly (there are rarely fixes and/or entire applications here and not on Flathub)
    4.5. Podman if applicable. (This does require some background knowledge on containers usually and can often be skipped for the beginner or intermediate user. I just slightly prefer it.)
  5. Toolbox
    5.5 Local binaries/app images (I try to avoid these but if they are well packaged and easy to update I will include them sometimes)
    5.75 Virtual Machines/GNOME Boxes (highly task dependent but can be useful in certain scenarios)
  6. rpm-ostree install ... rpm-ostree has gotten wonderful, but it is still not perfect, and this should always be your last option.

It may seem like a lot, but once you get a workflow going it really isn’t. Work is also always being done to defragment a lot of this and expand flatpaks.

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Does toolbox create a seperate home by default? Distrobox doesnt and I would highly recommend doing so to prevent collisions of apps

This has been discussed thoroughly in Isolated development environments to fend against bugs and malware in code under development, hygiene, etc. · Issue #183 · containers/toolbox · GitHub and other issues reported to Toolbox.

The short answer is that the goal of Toolbox is to have a way to use a shell under your regular account but with ability to do ad-hoc installation of RPMs. If you want something else there are other tools for that (like Distrobox).

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toolbox does not create a seperate /home/ for your applications, but you can use podman to create an image and configure it to use a different /home/ and potentially also change the SELinux context of that image. I’m testing some of that now with my browser in containers experiment.

podman is really under served and more of a blackbox than it should be. It does need a lot of configuration but is really powerful here. Follow my thread and progress if you are interested in development/ sandboxed environments.

Distrobox can create a separate /home/ if you provide the flag for it.

I agree with this statement, but I would add the trio of tools, Buildah, Podman, and Skopeo are all undersold for their real cool abilities. I use Podman Desktop which is great IMO since you can make OCI images there as well as with Cockpit too. I’ll check out your link.

Leave a comment there if you have questions. it’ll be more in depth and more focused on sandboxing, and teesting new applications. Thanks

Okay, distrobox also doesnt by default but distrobox-create Fedora --home /var/home/user/distrobox/fedora/ for example does that. No need for manual Podman tweaks.

Well, that’s what I said. . . toolbox is the one that needs the tweaks, not distrobox. When toolbox was released I was one of a handful to quickly make the request ! :upside_down_face: