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.
This is a neat write up, but I’m curious what gaming inside a Distrobox container would be like. For starters, is there any performance impact or potential glitches like screen tearing, and second, could I say, install a more recent mesa package in the container (assuming this is Fedora Silverblue), and have the game use it?
Should work fine, bazzite even has a premade one, try it:
distrobox create --nvidia --image ghcr.io/ublue-os/bazzite-arch --name bazzite-archOut of curiosity what’s the reason to run games in a distrobox container instead of just running them in the host os?
The immediate advantage is that you could get newer mesa in your distrobox but continue to use a stable one in the host so that it doesn’t fuck up your more important work. I switched to using containers or flatpaks for everything on my system a while ago. I have a distrobox for running odd games I get off Itch and stuff like Steam/Bottles is from flatpak. I even run Silverblue now and haven’t had any major issues for about 2 years at this point. Hell I was switching between GNOME 45 Beta and 44 Stable like it was no big deal.
I’m using the proprietary drivers anyway, afaik Mesa still isn’t as performant as Nvidia is it?