9 ms·

The Joy of Linux Theming in the Age of Bootable Containers

193 points by dopple 1y ago

OsrsNeedsf2P 1y ago
Sometimes I wonder why there isn't more enthusiasm around theming. Chicago95[0] is popular, but I also love how Garuda[0] themes KDE. There's some small websites for downloading themes on various DEs, but most of them are a bit jank and it seems built-in support beyond basic things like accents aren't there. [0] https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 [1] https://garudalinux.org/editions https://garudalinux.org/editions (screenshots don't do it justice)
- wlesieutre 1y ago
  Because it always works well for like two applications and everything else looks half assed
  - seba_dos1 1y ago
    That's how it works in GNOME, yes.
    - wlesieutre 1y ago
      That and half of all new software being "draw a pretty picture, stick it in a webview" with no attempt to use the themeable widgets. Even on Mac OS there used to be solid theming support (thanks, Unsanity) because software all used the system UI widgets. Not nearly as common anymore.
- amarant 1y ago
  I used to really enjoy theming and Riceing, but then I realised it was pointless: my monitor always looks the same, with a full screen IDE window covering up all my fancy themes
  - keyringlight 1y ago
    I think that speaks to another aspect, individual apps taking full control over how they're presented instead of inheriting whatever framework the DE is providing or the cohabitation of various KDE/QT/GTK/X/other, or electron framework defaults. Over on windows even when uxtheme skinning was in full swing it was the start of applications doing it themselves (winamp and quicktime come to mind), but I have the impression developers doing so made sure the extra effort had a payoff.
    - robinsonb5 1y ago
      I remember back in the day the apps most likely to have completely custom UIs tended to be scanner drivers. I'm not sure why!
- WD-42 1y ago
  The Gnome/gtk folks have been systematically removing theming capabilities for the last decade+ in the pursuit of an Apple-like philosophy towards ui. This has really killed a lot of theming because so many apps use GTK.
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    Even before that, GTK app theming was a bit hit or miss, likely because of the way GTK uses CSS for themes. Personally I believe CSS to be quite ill-suited for the purpose. It’s ok if you’re writing a theme for a bespoke one-off app but breaks down in the system theme use case. In particular, CSS inheritance makes for a lot of unnecessary trouble for both third-party themes and accessibility affordances. Last I knew there was something of a disinclination away from paramaterization in the GTK dev sphere too, which is another significant problem for third party themes and accessibility. Hardcoded fonts, colors, etc makes for pointless brittle rigidity.
    - WD-42 1y ago
      Before css there were engines, which were like families of themes. One of them was the pixmap engine which was what it sounds like: it used images to make up elements of the theme. Some of the most ambitious themes used this engine. CSS didn’t come until much later.
      - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
        Yeah I recall having to install engines for some themes. One of them was murrine I think?
    - ChocolateGod 1y ago
      GTKs CSS engine is great for app developers because it's powerful and easy. You can make something look slick with little work. But its terrible for themers, it's like running a CSS override on every site that runs Bootstrap and expecting it to work properly. It won't. I don't run any themes anymore so it doesn't bother me.
  - 1y ago
- II2II 1y ago
  > Sometimes I wonder why there isn't more enthusiasm around theming. My guess: because it is difficult to develop software that can be themed and it is difficult to create themes that look good. Not only is it high effort, but it has relatively low returns. Themes mostly affect how things look and, ideally, have very little impact on functionality. I say ideally since, when there is an impact on functionality it is usually a negative one (e.g. buggy behaviour). Contrast that to a window manager or compositor: while it won't affect the functionality of individual applications (ideally), it does have a fairly significant impact upon how one interacts with the desktop as a whole.
- AlienRobot 1y ago
  Until I can change the color and font of everything on Linux the way I can on Windows XP, I'll never take Linux theming seriously. Seriously, just make GUIs. That is the solution to ALL of Linux problems. MAKE THE GUIs!!! I can't select the background color of panes from a color picker and instead I have to manually edit text config files and create folders inside dotfolders. Ridiculous. It's 2025.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Probably because it gets tiresome after a while, I used to be big into Winamp themes, back in the 90's there were plenty of Demoscene and gamedev sites with desktop of the day, and what not. After a while it loses the appeal, we decide to just use whatever defaults get offered, finetune one or two options and that is it.
- _fat_santa 1y ago
  > Sometimes I wonder why there isn't more enthusiasm around theming I can speak to this personally. I used to always tinker with various Linux desktops, themes, etc but nowadays I just use vanilla Ubuntu with zero theming modifications. There are two reasons for this: 1. Like others have said, theming is easy but consistency is hard. I've found that anything besides Gnome just turns into a shitshow where half your apps just don't theme properly. 2. It's a massive time sink. While I could create a very consistent theme, it would involve a massive time sink into dealing with all the edge cases. When I was in college and just used Linux "recreationally", I could justify spending a ton of time tinkering with my system and getting everything perfect. But these days I use Linux professionally so it's less about having a beautiful desktop and more about something that just works and gets out of my way so I can get my actual work done. I should note that I still play around with other DE's and themes though I now do it all in VM's. I'm slowly building up my own theme stack on a Debian VM and once I get everything buckled up I might actually deploy and it use it on my primary machine.
undeniablemess 1y ago
Interesting. Didn’t know about bootable containers. I guess the equivalent in the NixOS world would be its impermanence module, which erases root on every reboot to keep things as stateless as possible.
- microtonal 1y ago
  I think most bootc-based systems keep /etc, /var and others. So, it is more like Nix without impermanence where you can atomically change/update/rollback your system, but keep some system state.
sabslikesobs 1y ago
Great, original article. I didn't notice at first that this blogger is the very same author behind Blue95: https://github.com/winblues/blue95 https://github.com/winblues/blue95 I used to love theming my desktop environment, but the joy faded when I realized the UI felt much more magical than anything I was using it for. Wonderful application of the tech, though.
- pipes 1y ago
  Never seen blue95 before, that is really nice.
JCattheATM 1y ago
I think ZFS snapshots, or whatever the brtfs equivalent is, makes a lot more sense than using containers just to experiment with theming. I also don't think the distinction between distro and container is murky at all.
kayson 1y ago
I really like the idea of immutable Linux and bootable containers. My next project will probably be switching to bazzite. But I took a look at the Containerfile[1], and I have some big concerns about the fragility of their supply chain. It uses 20 different copr repos (granted, half are their own), and I didn't count how many packages. Best I can tell, none of the versions are pinned. They do dump a diff of all package versions in the release notes[2], but I wonder if anyone actually reviews it before release. All it takes is one vulnerability in one repo / package and you can enjoy your new cryptominer. There's something nice about running Debian and having confidence in all the packages because they're built and maintained by the Debian team. Of course there are exceptions, but in my experience they're rare. The only non-standard repo I regularly use is fish shell, and the updates are so few and far between (and very public) I think the risk is low. I suppose this isn't strictly a container-specific problem; you could add the repos and install / update all those packages yourself too. But being able to package everything up into a single file that you can then boot into as your OS means you're also packing all the supply chain risk. Curious if anyone else shares my concern or if I should just put my tinfoil hat back on... 1. https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/Containerfile https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/Containerfile 2. https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/releases/tag/42.20250417 https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/releases/tag/42.20250417
- microtonal 1y ago
  Nothing holds you from using bootable containers in the same way you use Debian and only use packages from the official Fedora repositories, starting from Fedora's bootc base images.
  - kayson 1y ago
    Yeah I think that may be what I end up doing.
- moondev 1y ago
  > Best I can tell, none of the versions are pinned. From your link, everything is pinned? So a theoretical exploit in a future release of package is not going to exist in this immutable release https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/releases/tag/42.20250417 https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/releases/tag/42.20250417
nickjj 1y ago
Regular containers also happen to work great for testing dotfiles. Many years ago I added an install script to https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles to get set up in basically 1 command because I wanted a quick way to bootstrap my own system. I used the official Debian and Ubuntu images to test things. Over the last few days I refactored things further to support Arch Linux which has an official Docker image too. This enables being able to do full end to end tests in about 5 minutes. The container spins up in 1 second, the rest is the script running its course. Since it's just a container you can also use volume mounts and leave the container running in case you want to incrementally test things without wiping the environment. Additionally it lets folks test it out without modifying their system in 1 command. Docker has enabled so many good things over the last 10+ years.
- gbraad 1y ago
  No place like ${HOME} https://dotfiles.gbraad.nl https://dotfiles.gbraad.nl ;-). I went further and generate images to easily spin up development environments, based on bootc vms or containers. Never stop tweaking. No computer can be called home until it runs your own set of aliases/commands.
- bagatelle 1y ago
  Just glancing through your dotfiles, I was wondering why you use VcXsrv. WSLg has always been fine for me, and I've never heard of anyone trying to use a different X server.
  - nickjj 1y ago
    Thanks a lot for the reminder. I just pushed an update to remove VcXsrv at: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles/commit/fdc1ddd95c2defb7910a8cec39e3b0aec27712f2 https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles/commit/fdc1ddd95c2defb791... As for why I was using it: I've been using WSL since nearly the beginning (2017 / 2018) and used VcXsrv back then to get bi-directional clipboard sharing before WSLg was available. For a brief time I even ran Sublime Text in WSL 1 way back in the day. Then I used WSL 2. Then I tried WSLg when it first came out and it was really bad. Clipboard sharing didn't work for me which was the only reason I wanted to use it. I set `guiApplications=false` and never looked back. I just tried it again now by closing VcXsrv and removing any DISPLAY related settings I had in my zsh profile. Then I shutdown WSL and started up my instance. Bingo, clipboard sharing "just works" and I also installed xcalc which ran flawlessly. This simplifies things so much.
trollied 1y ago
This made me think, I used to love playing with Enlightenment back in the day. It was really trying to push what X11 could do. Surprised it's still going https://www.enlightenment.org/ https://www.enlightenment.org/
- robinsonb5 1y ago
  The irony is that back in the day it was the heavyweight option - now it's super-lightweight compared to the dominant desktop environments.
qwerty456127 1y ago
I am actually surprised how bad the actual state of the art is. I would expect modern OSes to be infinitely and easily themable and a thriving scene of OS theming to exist (and offer perfect retro revival themes alongside completely original and loosely inspired ones) but it apparently is not the case at all.
dicytea 1y ago
bootc would be more attractive for this theming use-case, if there's a 1-line method to spin up a graphical VM straight from the docker file. I looked into it, but it looks like that you need to manually build the image and fiddle around with qemu.
- JCattheATM 1y ago
  Yeah, a VM or just filesystem snapshots make much more sense. Containers are so easy so people just started using them for every use case, even when it doesn't necessarily make the most sense.
Havoc 1y ago
I find LXC a bit more intuitive as testing platform than docker. Much of a sameness I suppose. Also discovered that for me it’s less the OS or paradigm or theme/look and more that the windows manager is tiling type.
- udev4096 1y ago
  Barebones LXC is painful to even get it working. I have been using incus [0] for managing LXC containers. It is very lightweight and has a great cli, give it a shot! [0] - https://github.com/lxc/incus https://github.com/lxc/incus
  - Havoc 1y ago
    I am admittedly cheating a bit on that - proxmox. Heard incus is coming to truenas though so will try it there.
gigel82 1y ago
Off topic, but this website burned my eyes and I could almost hear my OLED crying. One of the rare examples where "Dark Reader" not only failed but actually made it more light; there must be some funky CSS shenanigans going on.
- concerndc1tizen 1y ago
  That's more a you-problem (Dark Reader) than a website-problem?
  - Firehawke 1y ago
    Hard disagree. Accessibility matters, and some of us are photosensitive to large amounts of bright white. Design your CSS to not completely break with a forced dark theme and this won't be a problem.
    - concerndc1tizen 1y ago
      It matters to you. Why are you projecting your needs onto others? Perhaps there's a nicer way to say it? "If the author so pleases, he may consider improving accessibility by making it compatible with Dark Reader." Then it is phrased as a request, rather than a complaint or critique.
WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
While this may be a nice exercise to learn bootc, shipping a whole OCI image, just because you wanted to put a couple files under /usr seems quite wasteful to me. To put things into perspective, GTK themes, unless they bring lots and lots of bitmap images (which doesn't happen nowadays), rarely exceed a megabyte in size. I guess one could spend less time learning how to package these as RPM packages and set up COPR to do just that, making OCI + bootc entirely optional (and yet you could build an OCI + bootc installing this package if you so wished!).
mfro 1y ago
As the commentor that asked previously, "Is it really necessary to spin up an entirely new distro for an XFCE+GTK theme?", Blue95 makes much more sense in the context of bootc usage. I was completely unaware of bootable containers until reading this. Though I will admin I would still prefer something that can be installed easily over a base system. Perhaps see NsCDE[1] for an example. Great post! [1]: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
sohrob 1y ago
For me, the bootc project is one of the most exciting things happening in Linux right now. It would be nice if projects like Debian adopt it as one possible delivery format for those who prefer the atomic containerized workflow way of doing things. There is so much to be gained from a stability standpoint vs how things are done now. Side note: Judging by what I see on Reddit, the ability to theme a desktop is one of the top reasons someone develops a personal interest in Linux to begin with, so no need to justify that in my book.
zoezoezoezoe 1y ago
whatever is happening in the thumbnail image embodies my entire state of being.

193 points by dopple 1y ago

Sometimes I wonder why there isn't more enthusiasm around theming. Chicago95[0] is popular, but I also love how Garuda[0] themes KDE. There's some small websites for downloading themes on various DEs, but most of them are a bit jank and it seems built-in support beyond basic things like accents aren't there. [0] https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 [1] https://garudalinux.org/editions https://garudalinux.org/editions (screenshots don't do it justice)

wlesieutre 1y ago
Because it always works well for like two applications and everything else looks half assed
- seba_dos1 1y ago
  That's how it works in GNOME, yes.
  - wlesieutre 1y ago
    That and half of all new software being "draw a pretty picture, stick it in a webview" with no attempt to use the themeable widgets. Even on Mac OS there used to be solid theming support (thanks, Unsanity) because software all used the system UI widgets. Not nearly as common anymore.
amarant 1y ago
I used to really enjoy theming and Riceing, but then I realised it was pointless: my monitor always looks the same, with a full screen IDE window covering up all my fancy themes
- keyringlight 1y ago
  I think that speaks to another aspect, individual apps taking full control over how they're presented instead of inheriting whatever framework the DE is providing or the cohabitation of various KDE/QT/GTK/X/other, or electron framework defaults. Over on windows even when uxtheme skinning was in full swing it was the start of applications doing it themselves (winamp and quicktime come to mind), but I have the impression developers doing so made sure the extra effort had a payoff.
  - robinsonb5 1y ago
    I remember back in the day the apps most likely to have completely custom UIs tended to be scanner drivers. I'm not sure why!
WD-42 1y ago
The Gnome/gtk folks have been systematically removing theming capabilities for the last decade+ in the pursuit of an Apple-like philosophy towards ui. This has really killed a lot of theming because so many apps use GTK.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  Even before that, GTK app theming was a bit hit or miss, likely because of the way GTK uses CSS for themes. Personally I believe CSS to be quite ill-suited for the purpose. It’s ok if you’re writing a theme for a bespoke one-off app but breaks down in the system theme use case. In particular, CSS inheritance makes for a lot of unnecessary trouble for both third-party themes and accessibility affordances. Last I knew there was something of a disinclination away from paramaterization in the GTK dev sphere too, which is another significant problem for third party themes and accessibility. Hardcoded fonts, colors, etc makes for pointless brittle rigidity.
  - WD-42 1y ago
    Before css there were engines, which were like families of themes. One of them was the pixmap engine which was what it sounds like: it used images to make up elements of the theme. Some of the most ambitious themes used this engine. CSS didn’t come until much later.
    - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
      Yeah I recall having to install engines for some themes. One of them was murrine I think?
  - ChocolateGod 1y ago
    GTKs CSS engine is great for app developers because it's powerful and easy. You can make something look slick with little work. But its terrible for themers, it's like running a CSS override on every site that runs Bootstrap and expecting it to work properly. It won't. I don't run any themes anymore so it doesn't bother me.
- 1y ago
II2II 1y ago
> Sometimes I wonder why there isn't more enthusiasm around theming. My guess: because it is difficult to develop software that can be themed and it is difficult to create themes that look good. Not only is it high effort, but it has relatively low returns. Themes mostly affect how things look and, ideally, have very little impact on functionality. I say ideally since, when there is an impact on functionality it is usually a negative one (e.g. buggy behaviour). Contrast that to a window manager or compositor: while it won't affect the functionality of individual applications (ideally), it does have a fairly significant impact upon how one interacts with the desktop as a whole.
AlienRobot 1y ago
Until I can change the color and font of everything on Linux the way I can on Windows XP, I'll never take Linux theming seriously. Seriously, just make GUIs. That is the solution to ALL of Linux problems. MAKE THE GUIs!!! I can't select the background color of panes from a color picker and instead I have to manually edit text config files and create folders inside dotfolders. Ridiculous. It's 2025.
pjmlp 1y ago
Probably because it gets tiresome after a while, I used to be big into Winamp themes, back in the 90's there were plenty of Demoscene and gamedev sites with desktop of the day, and what not. After a while it loses the appeal, we decide to just use whatever defaults get offered, finetune one or two options and that is it.
_fat_santa 1y ago
> Sometimes I wonder why there isn't more enthusiasm around theming I can speak to this personally. I used to always tinker with various Linux desktops, themes, etc but nowadays I just use vanilla Ubuntu with zero theming modifications. There are two reasons for this: 1. Like others have said, theming is easy but consistency is hard. I've found that anything besides Gnome just turns into a shitshow where half your apps just don't theme properly. 2. It's a massive time sink. While I could create a very consistent theme, it would involve a massive time sink into dealing with all the edge cases. When I was in college and just used Linux "recreationally", I could justify spending a ton of time tinkering with my system and getting everything perfect. But these days I use Linux professionally so it's less about having a beautiful desktop and more about something that just works and gets out of my way so I can get my actual work done. I should note that I still play around with other DE's and themes though I now do it all in VM's. I'm slowly building up my own theme stack on a Debian VM and once I get everything buckled up I might actually deploy and it use it on my primary machine.

undeniablemess 1y ago

Interesting. Didn’t know about bootable containers. I guess the equivalent in the NixOS world would be its impermanence module, which erases root on every reboot to keep things as stateless as possible.

microtonal 1y ago
I think most bootc-based systems keep /etc, /var and others. So, it is more like Nix without impermanence where you can atomically change/update/rollback your system, but keep some system state.

sabslikesobs 1y ago

Great, original article. I didn't notice at first that this blogger is the very same author behind Blue95: https://github.com/winblues/blue95 https://github.com/winblues/blue95 I used to love theming my desktop environment, but the joy faded when I realized the UI felt much more magical than anything I was using it for. Wonderful application of the tech, though.

pipes 1y ago
Never seen blue95 before, that is really nice.

JCattheATM 1y ago

I think ZFS snapshots, or whatever the brtfs equivalent is, makes a lot more sense than using containers just to experiment with theming. I also don't think the distinction between distro and container is murky at all.

kayson 1y ago

I really like the idea of immutable Linux and bootable containers. My next project will probably be switching to bazzite. But I took a look at the Containerfile[1], and I have some big concerns about the fragility of their supply chain. It uses 20 different copr repos (granted, half are their own), and I didn't count how many packages. Best I can tell, none of the versions are pinned. They do dump a diff of all package versions in the release notes[2], but I wonder if anyone actually reviews it before release. All it takes is one vulnerability in one repo / package and you can enjoy your new cryptominer. There's something nice about running Debian and having confidence in all the packages because they're built and maintained by the Debian team. Of course there are exceptions, but in my experience they're rare. The only non-standard repo I regularly use is fish shell, and the updates are so few and far between (and very public) I think the risk is low. I suppose this isn't strictly a container-specific problem; you could add the repos and install / update all those packages yourself too. But being able to package everything up into a single file that you can then boot into as your OS means you're also packing all the supply chain risk. Curious if anyone else shares my concern or if I should just put my tinfoil hat back on... 1. https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/Containerfile https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/Containerfile 2. https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/releases/tag/42.20250417 https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/releases/tag/42.20250417

microtonal 1y ago
Nothing holds you from using bootable containers in the same way you use Debian and only use packages from the official Fedora repositories, starting from Fedora's bootc base images.
- kayson 1y ago
  Yeah I think that may be what I end up doing.
moondev 1y ago
> Best I can tell, none of the versions are pinned. From your link, everything is pinned? So a theoretical exploit in a future release of package is not going to exist in this immutable release https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/releases/tag/42.20250417 https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/releases/tag/42.20250417

nickjj 1y ago

Regular containers also happen to work great for testing dotfiles. Many years ago I added an install script to https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles to get set up in basically 1 command because I wanted a quick way to bootstrap my own system. I used the official Debian and Ubuntu images to test things. Over the last few days I refactored things further to support Arch Linux which has an official Docker image too. This enables being able to do full end to end tests in about 5 minutes. The container spins up in 1 second, the rest is the script running its course. Since it's just a container you can also use volume mounts and leave the container running in case you want to incrementally test things without wiping the environment. Additionally it lets folks test it out without modifying their system in 1 command. Docker has enabled so many good things over the last 10+ years.

gbraad 1y ago
No place like ${HOME} https://dotfiles.gbraad.nl https://dotfiles.gbraad.nl ;-). I went further and generate images to easily spin up development environments, based on bootc vms or containers. Never stop tweaking. No computer can be called home until it runs your own set of aliases/commands.
bagatelle 1y ago
Just glancing through your dotfiles, I was wondering why you use VcXsrv. WSLg has always been fine for me, and I've never heard of anyone trying to use a different X server.
- nickjj 1y ago
  Thanks a lot for the reminder. I just pushed an update to remove VcXsrv at: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles/commit/fdc1ddd95c2defb7910a8cec39e3b0aec27712f2 https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles/commit/fdc1ddd95c2defb791... As for why I was using it: I've been using WSL since nearly the beginning (2017 / 2018) and used VcXsrv back then to get bi-directional clipboard sharing before WSLg was available. For a brief time I even ran Sublime Text in WSL 1 way back in the day. Then I used WSL 2. Then I tried WSLg when it first came out and it was really bad. Clipboard sharing didn't work for me which was the only reason I wanted to use it. I set `guiApplications=false` and never looked back. I just tried it again now by closing VcXsrv and removing any DISPLAY related settings I had in my zsh profile. Then I shutdown WSL and started up my instance. Bingo, clipboard sharing "just works" and I also installed xcalc which ran flawlessly. This simplifies things so much.

trollied 1y ago

This made me think, I used to love playing with Enlightenment back in the day. It was really trying to push what X11 could do. Surprised it's still going https://www.enlightenment.org/ https://www.enlightenment.org/

robinsonb5 1y ago
The irony is that back in the day it was the heavyweight option - now it's super-lightweight compared to the dominant desktop environments.

qwerty456127 1y ago

I am actually surprised how bad the actual state of the art is. I would expect modern OSes to be infinitely and easily themable and a thriving scene of OS theming to exist (and offer perfect retro revival themes alongside completely original and loosely inspired ones) but it apparently is not the case at all.

dicytea 1y ago

bootc would be more attractive for this theming use-case, if there's a 1-line method to spin up a graphical VM straight from the docker file. I looked into it, but it looks like that you need to manually build the image and fiddle around with qemu.

JCattheATM 1y ago
Yeah, a VM or just filesystem snapshots make much more sense. Containers are so easy so people just started using them for every use case, even when it doesn't necessarily make the most sense.

Havoc 1y ago

I find LXC a bit more intuitive as testing platform than docker. Much of a sameness I suppose. Also discovered that for me it’s less the OS or paradigm or theme/look and more that the windows manager is tiling type.

udev4096 1y ago
Barebones LXC is painful to even get it working. I have been using incus [0] for managing LXC containers. It is very lightweight and has a great cli, give it a shot! [0] - https://github.com/lxc/incus https://github.com/lxc/incus
- Havoc 1y ago
  I am admittedly cheating a bit on that - proxmox. Heard incus is coming to truenas though so will try it there.

gigel82 1y ago

Off topic, but this website burned my eyes and I could almost hear my OLED crying. One of the rare examples where "Dark Reader" not only failed but actually made it more light; there must be some funky CSS shenanigans going on.

concerndc1tizen 1y ago
That's more a you-problem (Dark Reader) than a website-problem?
- Firehawke 1y ago
  Hard disagree. Accessibility matters, and some of us are photosensitive to large amounts of bright white. Design your CSS to not completely break with a forced dark theme and this won't be a problem.
  - concerndc1tizen 1y ago
    It matters to you. Why are you projecting your needs onto others? Perhaps there's a nicer way to say it? "If the author so pleases, he may consider improving accessibility by making it compatible with Dark Reader." Then it is phrased as a request, rather than a complaint or critique.

WesolyKubeczek 1y ago

While this may be a nice exercise to learn bootc, shipping a whole OCI image, just because you wanted to put a couple files under /usr seems quite wasteful to me. To put things into perspective, GTK themes, unless they bring lots and lots of bitmap images (which doesn't happen nowadays), rarely exceed a megabyte in size. I guess one could spend less time learning how to package these as RPM packages and set up COPR to do just that, making OCI + bootc entirely optional (and yet you could build an OCI + bootc installing this package if you so wished!).

mfro 1y ago

As the commentor that asked previously, "Is it really necessary to spin up an entirely new distro for an XFCE+GTK theme?", Blue95 makes much more sense in the context of bootc usage. I was completely unaware of bootable containers until reading this. Though I will admin I would still prefer something that can be installed easily over a base system. Perhaps see NsCDE[1] for an example. Great post! [1]: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

sohrob 1y ago

For me, the bootc project is one of the most exciting things happening in Linux right now. It would be nice if projects like Debian adopt it as one possible delivery format for those who prefer the atomic containerized workflow way of doing things. There is so much to be gained from a stability standpoint vs how things are done now. Side note: Judging by what I see on Reddit, the ability to theme a desktop is one of the top reasons someone develops a personal interest in Linux to begin with, so no need to justify that in my book.

zoezoezoezoe 1y ago

whatever is happening in the thumbnail image embodies my entire state of being.