Distrobox allows you to run the userland of a different distro in a container, like Docker.

Different than Docker, the container sees your /home and talks to your local display server.

As an example, you can enter an Arch Linux Distrobox on another distro (say Debian) on the command line. You are now in an Arch terminal. You can run pacman for example and install software from the Arch repos or the AUR. If it is GUI software, you can launch it and it shows up as a regular window in your display. And if you want to load or save files, the /home you see is the real one from your host system.

What is cool is that you can run Distrobox-export inside Distrobox to export an application to your host. It will create an entry in the app menu of your host desktop environment (eg. KDE). Once you have done that, you can launch the application anytime and it will just run and appear on your screen like any other application. Except, under the hood, it is really running in a container on top ot the userland of a different distro.

You can think of it like Flatpak but where you can install the apps from a real Linux distro and not just FlatHub.

So you can run Fedora KDE and use an Ubuntu Distrobox to run those missing apps that are keeping you on Ubuntu. Be free.

I mentioned Arch as I often use Distrobox to get access to the AUR on other distros. For example, I use Chimera Linux which uses MUSL instead of Glibc. If there is something that would not run on MUSL, I can just install it via Distrobox instead (which will run that app on Glibc on my otherwise MUSL system).

But you can use whatever Distro you want. I could be installing Fedora packages instead. Or maybe you are forced to use Arch but hate all the up to date packages. You could use Distrobox to install all the Debian ones instead.

You can mix and match if you want. You can use Distrobox for more than one Distro.

Or you can create a Distrobox for a specific purpose. Love Mint but need to develop apps for RHEL? Run RHEL in a Distrobox and do your dev there.

Mostly I use the packages from my distro. But if something is missing, or the version is too old, Distrobox to the rescue.

We may not be disagreeing. I guess it depends what you mean by read.

Cool. I used to but mostly Chimera Linux these days.

That said, I probably have more instances of Debian running than anything else if you count VMs and containers.

The distro matters less than it used to now that we have Flatpak and Distrobox.

If you are hardcore, your distro puts /bin, /usr/bin, and /usr/sbin in all in the same directory.

Einstein reportedly said “Never memorize something you can look up in a book”. When asked the speed of sound he said , “I do not know but that number is commonly found in textbooks”.

I am not going to spend my life reading manuals. Reading my furnace manual years before a problem arises is unlikely to help me.

However, I completely agree that RTFM is a great thing to do with confronted with a gap in knowledge or problem to be solved. Not the whole manual probably, just the relevant parts.

I think it is much more important to store ideas in your head than information. That said, those ideas do not come from nothing.

I might not read the man pages of every command on a Linux system. At least, not all of them. But I should know high-level what commands are available and what they generally do. That allows me to think of them when they would be useful. But I probably have no idea what the proper syntax is for any of them when I go to use them.

And “the manual” is not always the best place to get ideas, even if it is the authoritative source for specific knowledge.

Time spent reading the manual is time not spent doing something else. Spend your time learning. Spend most of it learning what is possible. In my view, that is the best strategy.

I am not much of a bash guy so it took me a moment to understand what this was doing.

Too bad I have to read so many man pages before I get to bash or sh.

The Debian safety net is not to use third-party repos at all.

Sound strategy. So no arguing.

That said, Debian 13 has effectively been available for many months now. It did not just spring into the world as Debian is developed quite slowly and completely out in the open. The biggest difference when it becomes “official” is that a wider audience tries it.

So we cannot all just “wait and see”. Somebody has to use it and report back.

It does if tech changes fast.

First, many rich people are older people.

Regardless of age, rich people bought expensive TVs when even the best ones were smaller. They still work great and have not been replaced.

Also, a TV is not as important to rich people. If they want to watch the game, they get tickets. The old screen is good enough. And a smaller screen probably fits nicer into their decor. In a poor household, the TV is the centrepiece and even if it is ugly, it looks better than the rest of the room.

Finally, rich people may be busier. I do not want this comment to be misunderstood but the reality is that television is just not as central to their lives.

Mostly though, I just think older TVs are smaller.

Ya. The CEO has a person that has a phone and a laptop.

Every time the CEO walks by he thinks “that guy has upper management written all over him”.

What is outdated about Cinnamon?

Have you heard of Distrobox?

You can run Debian and still get access to the AUR. I moved from Arch to Chimera Linux and but I still get a few things out of the AUR.

With Distrobox export, you can even add them into the app menu in KDE. So you do not even have to manually launch Distrobox to use them.

I moved my mother to Mint a few months ago. I have not had a single tech support call. She uses it daily. About a week in I asked her how it was going. She liked that printing worked more reliably and wished the scroll bars in Facebook were a bit thicker. Her printer used to show as offline sometimes in Windows but that issue has gone away under Mint. I was going to look for a theme with thicker scroll bars but she told me not to bother.

Granted she was a Firefox and Thunderbird user already so that helped with the transition.

Have you heard of Distrobox?