Distrobox is a great alternative to software like VirtualBox, QEMU, Boxes, KVM, VMware Workstation, Hyper-V, just to name a few. Of course, there are some differences between classic virtualization apps and Distrobox.
This is mainly because Distrobox is an open-source wrapper for virtualization technologies such as Podman or Docker (depending on what you want).
The thing that makes Distrobox different is that it provides you with a way to install whatever Linux system you want directly into your host system (as if they are native apps, meaning you can access them directly from your host system search menu).
Distrobox is a great app that’s relatively easy to use, if you’re familiar with CLI. If that’s not the case, fret not, there’s a cool little app called BoxBuddy that can (and most probably will) make your life a bit easier.
BoxBuddy is a sleek GTK4/Libadwaita graphical user interface for Distrobox. Its purpose is to simplify the whole process of working with Distrobox. Hence, you can now create container images of various Linux distros directly from the desktop, with just a few mouse clicks (as opposed to having to write commands in the Terminal).
BoxBuddy is an unofficial application, so it’s not in any shape or form affiliated with Distrobox. With its help, you can manage a wide range of Distroboxes. For instance, you can upgrade Distroboxes, you can view installed apps, open the Terminal for any specific box, as well as remove Distroboxes.
The most convenient way to install BoxBuddy is directly from Flathub, however, you can also build it for your specific system directly from the app’s Releases section on GitHub.
Please note that BoxBoddy does not come with Podman or Docker pre-installed. That said, you’ll have to manually install either Podman, or Docker.
Distrobox is a powerful (and interesting) tool that provides a somewhat different way of running various Linux distros in a containerized fashion. BoxBuddy, if anything, only makes Distrobox a lot better by providing the day-to-day user with a quicker and less complicated way of interacting with it.
