Community maintained images for toolbox (and distrobox)
In this post I will discuss how we made community maintained container images for common Linux distributions available for use with toolbox (and distrobox) and why we can not call them “official”.
What is toolbox (or toolbx)?
But first, let’s start with a bit of context. On image based Linux distributions (such as Fedora Silverblue, Fedora Kinoite, Fedora CoreOS, etc.), it is not practical to install random packages the way you may be used to do on classic package based Linux distributions. You are expected to run applications in containers, either via Flatpak for graphical applications, or via podman for command line ones.
While you can directly manage your own custom container images and environment configurations, it is not useful to have everyone rediscover what to do thus a new tool has been created to make that easier: toolbox (or toolbx) (containers/toolbox on GitHub).
Toolbox lets you easily create a mutable and persistent environments inside containers that are well integrated with your host system.