I’ve been working and testing to switch my main PC (used for work like audio recording, music, and general multimedia) and have been playing with Ubuntu Studio on my laptop. Loving it so far but I keep seeing people talk about CachyOS, Bazzite, or the new Debian Trixie.
I’m having trouble finding what’s really different about all these distros aside from how they look or slight changes in how they do things (I know Ubuntu Studio has a low latency kernel which seems important for what I need to do). Is there a big difference? Like, if I go with Ubuntu Studio am I gonna end up wiping everything and installing CachyOS or Bazzite or something in a month because it’s better? Or are all these distros basically the same thing with a different look and feel and as long as I choose one that gets regular updates, it doesn’t matter fundamentally?
I’m trying to grasp the Linux concept but being a Windows user my whole life I’m struggling to ‘get it’. Instead of trying to understand in the contex of Windows or Mac, is a better comparison Apple/Android? Like iPhones would be similar to both Mac and Windows (you don’t get to choose much) and Android would be Linux (I know it’s built on it haha) and it’s really just a bunch of different options to do the same thing?
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.