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Comment by gilbetron | Hacker News Reader

The issue with Docker is that it doesn't support a GUI at all. Jupyter (and it's ilk) work for some needs, but I haven't found a good one that works for many of the (weird) libraries/applications that scientists use that need a GUI. My wife does IT for Physics/Astronomy and would loves something like Docker, but supports a GUI. There's an option of doing X-Windows trickery, but that's very fragile.

Any ideas?

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https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk...

Not fragile at all. Just mount the appropriate socket and there you go.

Alernatively, you can also run vnc or rdp inside the container:

https://gist.github.com/gmacario/11385611

A robust solution for Windows, Mac, and Linux is needed :/

Doesn't Docker with with VMs on Windows and Mac? (At least I know it does on the Mac).

Maybe it's still possible to mount an X11 socket from Windows/Mac to the VM (and then to Docker?)??

It's still trickery, but if you can get that to work on the Mac and Windows Docker clients, then you could distribute the Linux version of the custom apps and everyone is happy :)

Yeah, an X11 solution is one path forward - but it seems to be a bit brittle on Windows and Mac. But it is possible!

A lot of custom lab software is written in things like Python3 / PyQT5. While I prefer web interfaces, and think Chrome is as portable an interface as any. Its parcel to a more germane problem I have seen across domains: a way to visually peek into long running server process or computation progress.

At Kyso.io we provide a ready-made docker image (with all the popular data science and machine learning libraries) in the Jupyter environment. With our GUI it's super simple to start up projects with one click. Use our terminal to easily install additional packages.

I was able to get Firefox running from a Docker container pretty easily. Just need to export your local $DISPLAY to your container with the -e switch (by IP) and volume-mount your .Xauthority directory.

You would have to do similar things if this were running in a VM.

I have found it useful for some purposes to install lubuntu-desktop and tigervnc in a docker container. Leads to enormous images, but it runs GUI applications via a VNC viewer like remmina.

What about just using Vagrant with GUI VBox?

Is this robust across Windows, Mac, and Linux?

I'm pretty sure, yeah.

Cool, giving it a try today - thanks :)

Flatpak was designed for packaging desktop applications, but it seems like it would fit your needs reasonably well.

Environment is Windows, Mac, and Linux. This looks linux only.

http://datacabinet.info

Disclosure: I work on this project.

I think your definition of GUI and the parents are very different.

We do x-windows trickery to enable inline graphics within Jupyter natively.

at least on a linux host docker can support running GUI applications just fine

That's the issue - the environment consists of Windows, Mac, and Linux, so it isn't as simple as the Linux case :/

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