Distrobox is the single piece of software that completely changed the way I work. If you’ve hear of or used Vagrant and thought it was a great idea but implemented in a really heavy handed manner, then Distrobox is exactly what you’ve been looking for. Within a month Distrobox became my primary dev environment and that hasn’t changed for over a year. In this post I hope to share how I use Distrobox and give you some tips for making the experience even better.
    • Lupec@lemm.ee
      4·
      10 months ago

      I think so but this method does remove the quite significant barrier of having to figure out nix’s language and quirks, so I’d argue there’s merit to the workflow. Still, you’re trading it for containerization know-how, so not necessarily the best choice.

    • hackeryarn@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      10 months ago

      Yeah it does. I actually use nix as my base OS on one machine. But when I need to work on a project that will never be packaged with nix, and I need all the dependencies, it really becomes impossible to just use nix.

      Nix makes an amazing bas OS, however.

  • False@lemmy.world
    2·
    10 months ago

    I don’t really get the comparison to vagrant. It doesn’t seem like it feels the same role? Can distro box be used to share environments with other developers or used in CI/CD processes?

    • hackeryarn@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      10 months ago

      I use it to share environments with a small team. Just have distrobox specific Docker files and we can all spin up the same distrobox environment locally.

      We end up having a different base docker file (e.g. our distrobox one has editors and stuff), but we all share the same project specific docker file. That same project specific file gets used in CI/CD and deployment, but with a minimal base. So all in all, I would say it’s even better than Vagrant because we run the same system in production.