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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

Tip from one that has been running Silverblue for years: VSCode or any other editor from flatpak is a noob trap.

Yeah, I know now it's much more usable because it now integrates my host-spawn (https://github.com/1player/host-spawn) tool, but the easiest setup is to have a toolbox/distrobox container for work and dev, where you install all your tools.

I have been using an Arch Linux container (that starts at boot) with emacs, nvim, the myriad of LSP tools that are only found in AUR, exported with `distrobox-export` so I can start them from my dock.

Flatpak is for everything else (even Steam), but dev tools, editors and any other package should be installed inside a regular pet container.

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Bluefin comes with vscode and devcontainers set up out of the box, we don't recommend pet containers.

We found that people struggle with the pet toolbox pattern so we send them right to the devcontainer pattern. This is an area where we differ from Fedora. It should just come set up out of the box.

VSCode and Devcontainers work iff you want to use VSCode. Using Silverblue or Bluefin without toolbox or distrobox is setting yourself up for failure, because otherwise one will try to install everything through rpm-ostree and then complain that ostree is slow and stupid.

I don't see how one might struggle with learning how to use distrobox. Of course there's some learning curve, but if one wants a normal Linux they might as well use stock Fedora. All one needs is to create a terminal profile that launches `distrobox enter container`.

(I used to use bluefin until recently, when a regression on distrobox forced me back on Silverblue. I could not for the life of me force rpm-ostree to downgrade distrobox to 1.5.0 vs the 1.6.0 bluefin ships with; I reckon it's because bluefin is a container rather than an ostree commit, and downgrading packages is still unsupported)

We've held back versions of distrobox before, if you file an issue we can usually figure it out.

Though distrobox is bash so maybe running the older version in your home directory would have been a good bandaid in the meantime, maybe I should write that up as a tip?

But yeah +1 on distrobox!

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