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I might be off-base, but when I hear someone talk about running GUI tools in a container, I think about being able to effectively fork application configs/intal
by danShumway 7y ago
I might be off-base, but when I hear someone talk about running GUI tools in a container, I think about being able to effectively fork application configs/intallations and environments. I run an extremely minimal arch installation on my production machine. It's... nice, I guess. I'd love to experiment with it more and make something even more customized, but I can't risk any downtime.
And a large portion of my computer is command line tools, sure. But I'm also running EXWM, I'm also running Firefox, I'm also running Tiled, and Blender, and so on, and so on. I don't want to get rid of my command-line tools, but I'm not only running command line tools. I want to be able to download a game, put it in a container, mess around with my drivers until it runs well, and then delete the container when I'm done and know 100% all of the customization just went away.
This was what originally got me excited about Docker, until I dug into it and realized Docker kind of didn't work particularly well for that.
My understanding is if I sat down and did the research, I could build something like that with regular Linux tools, but it's time consuming and as interested as I am in the underlying tech, I just know very, very little about how this stuff works.
But I always perk up whenever I hear someone talking about running graphical applications in containers, because in the back of my head I'm mapping that to some kind of fictional computing utopia where I can have complete isolation between processes and treat my computer like a Git repo.
- tipsysquid 7y agoI have been wanting something like you describe for forever. Honestly, the closest thing that I've found to this that works-out-the-box is Crostini in ChromeOS. I don't love ChromeOS, but if I started building what you're looking for, I'd look at Crostini for inspiration. Crostini can spawn gui apps through Wayland instead of pure X. That takes effort and I wish they would contribute it back.