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containers
toolbox
Go2018–2026
containers / toolbox

toolbox

Tool for interactive command line environments on Linux

27Distinct people
30Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Tool for interactive command line environments on Linux

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year30 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-12-13 18:49:07 UTC to 2026-10-06 10:54:23 UTC.

02468102018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 1 submissions, 8 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC918
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

30 sources
> Linux people are very resistant to this, but the future is going to be sandboxed iOS style apps. Linux people are NOT resistant to this. Atomic desktops are picking up momentum and people are screaming for it. Snaps, flatpaks, appimages, etc. are all moving in that direction. As for plain development, sadly, the OS developers are simply ignoring the people asking. See: https://github.com/containers/toolbox/issues/183 https://github.com/containers/toolbox/issues/348 https://github.com/containers/toolbox/issues/1470 I'll leave it up to you to speculate why. Perhaps getting a bit of black eye and some negative attention from the Great Orange Website(tm) can light a fire under some folks.
In Notepad++ supply chain attack breakdown
Having smaller scaling units is a convenience. Yes. The mainframe world has tended to require massive upgrades to scale, yes. Yet, in many ways, the world we are in today is actually intensely terminal based. When you are on Facebook, on Google, ask yourself where the compute is happening. Ask yourself what you think the split is, what the ratio of client : server compute is. My money is that Facebook and Google spend far more compute than I do when I use their services. And that's with these companies spending probably billions of dollars carefully optimizing their server side architectures to relentlessly reduce cost. The hyperscalers use lots of powerful dense small servers. It could be argued that these servers more resemble one kind of shared personal computer model, since there are many dozens of them in the rack, not one big system
Read the rest
. But still, these systems host many dozens of requests at any given point in time, are being used as a shared system with many terminals connected to them. Last, I do think we have mis-optimized like hell, and have almost no data points about how incredibly bad a job we are doing, have almost no idea what a thin-client / terminal based world could look like. Much of the reason for personal computers is that individuals had power over these systems, that it didn't take getting departmental them IT approval for each use case: you have your computer and do with it as you will. The organizational complexity pushed us away from the terminal model long long long ago. But today, there's enormously popular container options. There's incredibly festureful container-based development options abundant, with web or GUI options abound. Toolbox is a great example. https://github.com/containers/toolbox I guess it could be argued that this brings a personal computer model to a shared terminal system, hybridized the option? But I long to see better richer shared systems, that strive to create interconnected multi user systems, that we terminal into. There is so much power on tap now, so many amazing many core chips that we could be sharing very effectively, offloading work to, while sparing our batteries & reducing our work:idle compute ratios drastically with.
In The "personal computer" model scales better than the "terminal" model
That's okay for the base OS that doesn't change all that often. However, that falls apart when you start trying to have lots of "toolbox"/"containers"/"docker" things that people want to use for development. The DNFs you need inside the container pile up very quickly when trying to do development. Those want to be deduplicated between containers. There is a reason why Nix gets grief about how large its store becomes. In addition, lots of people also want to containerize their working/home directory. That requires really good overlay support, and nobody has this right now. There are LOTS of issues filed against "toolbox" for this, for example: https://github.com/containers/toolbox/issues/183 https://github.com/containers/toolbox/issues/348 https://github.com/containers/toolbox/issues/1470 This is something that should be straightforward
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to implement. However, because the filesystem support sucks, it is not.
In The Mutable OS: Why Isn't Windows Immutable in 2025?
I'm using Universal Blue now (Aurora, i.e. KDE flavour) and I'm very happy with it. With its large amount of pre-installed packages and drivers (including proprietary ones), I still didn't need to install any custom package (rpm-ostree) or otherwise modify the OS config (except for turning off SELinux in /etc/sysconfig/selinux). It's the most pragmatic distro I've used so far. SaveDesktop[0] (saves flatpak apps and DE configs) and mise-en-place[1] (declarative shell environment manager) are making my installation backupable and quite reproducible (not to NixOS standards though). For software that's not in flatpak, docker or mise, toolbox[2] and distrobox[3] are available for the rescue. Both work really well (toolbox seems better for CLIs, distrobox for GUIs), but all atomicity/declarativity is lost. [0] https://github.com/vikdevelop/Save
Read the rest
In Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts
raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/linux_kernel.html#cross-compiling-the-kernel: https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/linux_ke... 89luca89/distrobox: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox #quick-start 89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_tips.md#using-a-different-architecture: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_... lukechilds/dockerpi: https://github.com/lukechilds/dockerpi : RPi 1, (2,3,) in QEMU emulating ARM64 on x86_64 E.g. the Fedora Silverblue rpm-ostree distro has "toolbox" by default because most everything should be in a container containers/toolbox: https://github.com/containers/toolbox From https://containertoolbx.org/distros/ : > Distro support: By default, Toolbx creates the container using an OCI image called `<ID>-toolbox:<VERSION-ID>`, where <ID> and <VERSION-ID> are take
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n from the host’s `/usr/lib/os-release`. For example, the default image on a Fedora 36 host would be `fedora-toolbox:36`. > This default can be overridden by the `--image` option in `toolbox create`, but operating system distributors should provide an adequately configured default image to ensure a smooth user experience. The compiler arch flags might should be correctly specified in a "toolbox" container used for cross-compilation, too. There are default gcc and/or clang compiler flags in distros' default build tools; e.g. `make` specifies additional default compiler flags (that e.g. cmake, ninja, gn, or bazel/buck/pants may not also specify for you).
In Clang now makes binaries an original Pi B+ can't run
The team has both made a ton of effort switching off their proprietary Skia based rendering tech and adopting standard Wayland, and has put forward huge effort to making running incredibly well integrated real Linux containers just work. The headline is true. ChromeOS is Linux with Google’s desktop environment. But it obfuscates the details. It's a damned by omission statement. It has some really good sauce to help you not notice often, but it's not at all a Linux desktop environment one can regularly use. You can do a lot of Linux desktop-y things but only through well crafted special unique wrapped processes that mostly but not fully help mock & emulate a regular Linux desktop. Even though it now runs Wayland, the apps you want to run will have atypical intermediates up the wazoo. And no one else uses any of this tech. ChromiumOs has so
Read the rest
much interesting container tech, does such an interesting job making containers think they have a regular Linux / FreeDesktop environment. It's far far far far deeper virtualization than for example https://github.com/containers/toolbox . But you know what? Google has made zero effort to get these pieces adopted elsewhere. It's open source but not intended for use outside Chromium/ChromeOS. I respect & think ChromeOS is a quite viable Linux, and it's so much closer to the metal & more interesting, amazing tech, but my gods Microsoft has gone 300x further to establish wsl2 as a sustainable community effort folks could use & target, in a way that ChromiumOS has done nothing about. It's sad how Google has transformed from a company that appreciated & worked with ecosystems, that drove things collectively forward, into an individual player that does their own things & delivers from on high. ChromiumOS is such an incredible effort, but it's so internernally drive & focused, and it's hard to believe in such a wildcat effort, even though it's so so good. It keeps coming into better alignment with Linux Desktop actual, but via shims and emulations that no one else cares about or which seems marketed elsewhere. And that inward focus makes the whole effort both so exceptional & promising, but suspect. Such a different nearby but alternative & separately governed universe. ChromiumOS/ChromeOS do excellent at faking being a Linux desktop, and wonderfully have increasingly drawn more strength from that universe, but are still wholly their own very distinct very separate very controller other space. In many ways that's great, secure, good, and miraculously transparently done. But it's still hard to really trust, being such a weird alien impostor, faking so much for end user apps, and there's tension in believing ChromeOS will keep straddling the rift in pro-user manifestations forever.
In ChromeOS is Linux with Google’s desktop environment
> What’s the escape hatch to bring those into the dev environment? One thing you can do is try the Nix package manager on your Linux or macOS system. -- If it's not in nix, you can just do it the way you did things before. If you want to try NixOS: 1. Writing a package is only necessary for sharing code.. you can still just have Python, setup a virtual env, & run the program as you would. 2. You could use a tool like Podman or Docker, to run stuff in containers. I've heard stuff like https://github.com/containers/toolbox helps this. (Among other solutions).
In 20 years of Nix

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