Thought about toolbox after trying Fedora 34 Silverblue

One thing I found odd was opening a terminal in the host machine by default. For example when you open a terminal, it generally doesn’t open it as the root user in terms of UX, usually it opens up in your home folder as your user. 9 times out of 10, I’m working with files in my home folder, so that’s convenient. If I need to do something as another user such as root, I can switch to that user or use something like sudo. Besides layering some RPM packages or system updates, I would expect the majority of my time to be spent in a toolbox, not fiddling with the host. If there was a way to set a default toolbox when you open the terminal, that would be a nice UX touch IMO. Even if someone wanted the host to be the default, they would have the option that way.

Since this machine is primarily used for work, I would set that as my default toolbox with all the necessary tooling to do work stuff. I could run a command like toolbox switch rust-adventures or something like that on the weekends

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You could try making a GNOME Terminal profile which runs toolbox enter as a custom command.

You could make that your default profile, or create ~/.local/share/applications/toolbox-terminal.desktop like this:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Exec=gnome-terminal --geometry=80x40 --profile="Toolbox"
Icon=network-workgroup
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
Categories=Utility;
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And I agree it’d be awesome to have something like this by default.

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Thought this to be a great idea, added the profile and desktop file (which needs a “Name=Toolbox”, btw), and it doesn’t work as there is no default toolbox profile yet.

So for this to work, there should either be a little wizard to walk you through setting up a first, or basic toolbox (which would be very instructive, I think), or Silverblue should come with a default, working toolbox.

I use zsh as my shell, and every time I enter a toolbox it freaks out because zsh is missing. It’s all easily remedied, but it is a bit messy.

After it’s all configured it is now my favorite way of using the terminal, I hardly ever use the terminal outside of a toolbox anymore.

I was using ZSH for awhile, because it’s awesome! I found that it worked okay by installing it into the toolbox (since it isn’t there by default, only bash). The only caveat I found annoying was my prompt would not appear correct (ie colours etc) unless I used bash in the container.

Using my version of agnoster seems to work fine: github

Does need powerline fonts, though.