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Comment by apexalpha | Hacker News Reader

Does this support a full Ubuntu Desktop? At my job we test a lot of projects for which we require a load of (GUI) apps. Until now I've installed these in a VM and then reset the VM after the project so my host OS doesn't get cluttered.

If Distrobox can give me a full desktop Ubuntu in a container in stead of a VM that would be very welcome.

Thanks for the post, I'm diving in!

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Short answer is yes.

You are probably not going to run a “full Ubuntu Desktop” though. Is that what you want?

You would run your normal desktop ( from the host distro ). In Distrobox, you would have Ubuntu installed including whatever GUI apps you need. When you run those GUI apps, they appear on your regular desktop.

Yes my idea would be to have a full Ubuntu Desktop that I can use for a project, and then save it on our git. So when my colleagues have to work on this specific project they can just copy the container and dive in.

Of course this would also work with a regular Distrobox container but that requires more terminal action than some colleagues are comfortable with. Plus it's hard to see sometimes when a GUI app is from a container and when it's on your host. It's almost too seamless.

So having a single "window" into a full ubuntu container would be my preferred option.

In the post link, there's a section called "See it in action" with a video, and in there he shows an example of installing gedit into a container and running it.

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