3 ms·

Interesting approach to maintaining a clean dev environment using containers. This approach reminds me of Fedora Silverblue[1] that I’ve been wanting to try. It

Interesting approach to maintaining a clean dev environment using containers. This approach reminds me of Fedora Silverblue[1] that I’ve been wanting to try. It leverages OSTree for atomic upgrades and rollbacks. Users can run containers for CLI utils using toolbox[2]. This way, the base OS remains pristine, and there's less risk of "dependency hell" or inadvertent “package upgrades gone wrong”. [1]: https://fedoraproject.org/silverblue/ https://fedoraproject.org/silverblue/ [2]: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/toolbox/ https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/toolb...

smallerfish 3y ago
I have silverblue on a laptop, but hadn't poked about sufficiently yet. Toolbox looks great. Thanks for pointing it out.
speed_spread 3y ago
I use Silverblue and it works like a charm. The only problem I found is that you need to install your IDE locally instead of using a Flatpak to be able to launch it from within a toolbox. Also, toolboxes can not be upgraded across major versions (eg Fedora 37 -> 38) and have to be recreated instead.
eaglefield 3y ago
I'm running silverblue but running my containers through distrobox. Both toolbox and distrobox are running on podman under the hood, so it's the same technology as far as I understand. However, distrobox has some interesting features relevant to this idea of development isolation. One is that it has an assemble feature[1] built-in. Where you can feed it a recipe file and it will build or rebuild containers accordingly. The other is that it allows setting a custom home directory for the container, among other host/container isolating options[2]. Perfomance wise my containers take a couple MB of rams and no perceptible CPU usage when not in use. At least as far as I can tell. [1] https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/usage/distrobox-assemble.md https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/usage/d... [2] https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/usage/distrobox-create.md https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/usage/d...

smallerfish 3y ago

I have silverblue on a laptop, but hadn't poked about sufficiently yet. Toolbox looks great. Thanks for pointing it out.

speed_spread 3y ago

I use Silverblue and it works like a charm. The only problem I found is that you need to install your IDE locally instead of using a Flatpak to be able to launch it from within a toolbox. Also, toolboxes can not be upgraded across major versions (eg Fedora 37 -> 38) and have to be recreated instead.

eaglefield 3y ago

I'm running silverblue but running my containers through distrobox. Both toolbox and distrobox are running on podman under the hood, so it's the same technology as far as I understand. However, distrobox has some interesting features relevant to this idea of development isolation. One is that it has an assemble feature[1] built-in. Where you can feed it a recipe file and it will build or rebuild containers accordingly. The other is that it allows setting a custom home directory for the container, among other host/container isolating options[2]. Perfomance wise my containers take a couple MB of rams and no perceptible CPU usage when not in use. At least as far as I can tell. [1] https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/usage/distrobox-assemble.md https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/usage/d... [2] https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/usage/distrobox-create.md https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/usage/d...