Ever since I heard about the idea of immutable Linux distros, I was interested in them. A completely new take on the Linux desktop that utilized newer package managers and concepts to make a more solid OS sounded cool to me! And I was especially intrugued by all of the different takes on immutable distros themselves. A couple that caught my eye as a constant distro hopper were BlendOS and VanillaOS. If you aren’t familiar with either, they are both immutable distros that use containers on top of a host system to allow you to use whatever distro you want. In other words, if there are some apps you would rather use, or can only use on a certain distro, you just click a few buttons, spin up a container, and you can now install those packages in the environment of your choice.

I absolutely love this concept, but there are small things with both distros that caused me to stick with Fedora Silverblue as my distro of choice. For example, I loved VanillaOS, but couldn’t get Wireguard installed on the base distro (which I need for club stuff,) and it was also based on an EOL version of Ubuntu. BlendOS wouldn’t install on my Framework, which might have just been an odd glitch, but even last time I used it there were issues that turned me off to it. But that got me thinking: what if I took the container concept and applied it to Silverblue?

Distrobox incoming!

The way these distros create their containers is through Podman and Distrobox, both of which are installable on Fedora, and therefore on Silverblue with a quick rpm-ostree command. From there, I started learning Distrobox. Luckilly, the commands are pretty simple for creating and starting containers. For supported distros it will even create shortcuts in your apps menu so you can launch them quickly. From there, I found some distros to install (Debian and Kali) and went to town! Simple as that!

The result

This turned out really well! The only thing that’s a bit harder is having to do a little more work to find the right container and install it via the command line rather than just clicking a couple of buttons, but I don’t mind it. I am comfortable enough with the command line where that isn’t an issue for me. Plus with Fedora Silverblue as a base, I am more familiar with how to modify the base system, so I can actually install and use programs like Wireguard that I would need on the base system when necessary. Overall, I’m pretty happy with this!

This is post number 1 of (hopefully) 30 for WeblogPoMo 2024!