Distrobox (or Toolbox) is a nice tool[0], but honestly the reliance on Podman doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The necessary container functionality is available directly from the kernel[1] with little of the complication that Podman brings along, and from what I can tell[1] it is pretty straight-forward to pull docker and OCI images with simple HTTP interaction (or wget/curl) and extract with tar. This could be a stand-alone statically compiled executable with no dependencies that could work on any Linux distribution with no hassle at all, but isn't for some reason[2].

[0] I was exposed to it via Fedora Silverblue, where something like it is a necessity since the base OS is immutable. I've found it very useful even outside that use case however.

[1] Seems to me you could even use bwrap if you were reluctant to use syscalls directly.

[2] having done a little research towards creating my own tool because I'd rather not depend on a package that isn't available in many LTS distros, among other reasons.