Distrobox – Call any Linux distro from your terminal

Distrobox is a great project that will allow you to use any Linux distro directly from your Linux terminal.

Distrobox allows you to easily experiment with different Linux releases such as Fedora, openSUSE, Alpine Linux, Rocky Linux, and more without having to switch from your current Debian or Ubuntu setup. This is achieved by creating and launching a container of your chosen Linux release using either Podman or Docker.

Installing Distrobox is a straightforward process. You can simply use your distro’s package manager and search for the “distrobox” package from the list of supported distros. Alternatively, if the package is not available, you can use the curl command (although it’s not the cleanest method).

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/89luca89/distrobox/main/install | sudo sh

Then, all you have to do is create your distro with the command followed by the –image parameter to specify the distro.

distrobox create --image alpine my-alpine-container

Other parameters also make it possible to share directories between the host system and the installed Linux or to pass environment variables to it. Those accustomed to Docker will not be out of place.

Then to connect to the container:

distrobox-enter my-alpine-container -- sh -l

Other commands are also available in the documentation that I invite you to read. Anyway, it gives a little taste of WSL to the land of Linux (even if it’s not the same thing technically at all).

Distrobox is to be discovered here.