I was on Pop for a while, if I was still using an Nvidia card I would still be on Pop. Their built in support/installer is just so convenient and seamless for the most part.

Nvidia is just such a pain on Linux. Like if it works then great, but I have had just so many minor problems in the past.

My Nvidia card is essentially just a backup now in my server in case I need video output for a terminal.

Yeah, and rental prices have skyrocketed too.

During the next federal election this will be my "single issue" that will determine who I vote for.

At this point I can ignore our insane grocery/telecom prices, even though that is still a huge issue. The housing crises has far worse ripple effects down the chain: potential buyers can't buy so they rent nicer places, potential renters can't rent the nice places so they are overpaying for the rentals they can afford, and people who can't afford any of the rental prices are scraping by with roommates or on the streets.

And these development companies have the nerve to go to court over government investigations over their shady practices.

Shameless.

Yeah, potentially overkill, but all the power to anyone who wants to try them out. Freedom of choice is one of the best parts of Linux.

And sorry for the long response. It’s hard to gauge the proficiency that someone might have with Linux, so I tend to lean towards detailed explanations just in case

I think that there are definitely valuable/valid use cases for the software in the OP, but I think that the built in bash tools can get most people most of the way there. And learning the common bash/shell conventions is way more valuable than learning a custom tool that some distros/environments won’t support.

If someone already uses aliases, creates some custom scripts, and sets some useful environment variables (along with effective use of piping and redirection) and still needs something more specialized, then getting a new tool could help.

The downsides are a reliance on another piece of software to use the terminal. So I would only use something like this if I had a really solid and specific use case I couldn’t accomplish with what I already use.

Plex, PiHole, Photoprism, Home Assistant, Syncthing in a hub and spoke config, Caddy for reverse proxy, custom containers for: yt-dlp, restic, and rsync.

From a user perspective, Distrobox is a tool that lets you "spin up any distro inside your terminal".

You can basically create a mini Linux environment of any distro that you can access through the terminal. You can set it to share your home folder, our create a new home folder just for that mini environment.

Behind the scenes Distrobox is creating and managing containers through Podman or Docker. You could technically achieve the same thing by manually setting up Podman containers, Distrobox just makes it very easy to create and maintain those containers with the correct permissions. It also has useful tools where you could install an app in a Distrobox container, but then add that app to your host OS app list.

This makes it especially useful for immutable OSs. Instead of adding packages to your base OS, which should be kept as minimal as possible, you can just install them in a Distrobox, so your host's root filesystem is unaffected.

I daily drive Fedora Silverblue on my laptop and distrobox has been great.

I have layered only two packages: USB Guard and Distrobox. I run syncthing in a rootless podman container, and the rest goes through Distrobox.

I was even able to setup ProtonVPN in distrobox and it functions as if it was directly installed on the host (just need to map your home folder and some permissions).

I hope that immutable becomes either the standard or at least all major distros start offering it as an alternative. Makes everything foolproof and makes me much more willing to try new packages and tools because I can always just roll back.

The only thing that would really make it perfect is if files in /etc/ where also handled in a similar manner. IE: Can make changes to configuration files, and easily roll back to defaults at any time.