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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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How does distrobox implement display forwarding? Does it support Wayland, or is it using bind mounts for xauth and X11 unix sockets?
With approach does it use for hardware acceleration? Does it abstract over Open Container Initiative's plugin system, e.g. Nvidia container tool kit or AMD's equivalent?
Is it inconvenient if any of your applications use shared memory, like many middleware transports used for robotics or machine learning software development?
I'm more familiar with plain docker and dev containers, but am interested in learning more about distrobox (and toolbox?) as another escape hatch while working with NixOS.
Distrobox uses bind mounts by default to integrate with the host: X11 and Wayland sockets for display, PulseAudio/PipeWire sockets for audio, /dev/dri for GPU acceleration, and /dev/shm for shared memory. On NVIDIA systems it relies on the standard NVIDIA container toolkit, while AMD/Intel GPUs just work with Mesa. Compared to plain Docker, where you usually have to manually mount X11/Wayland sockets, Pulse/PA sockets, /dev/shm, and GPU devices, Distrobox automates all of this so GUI, audio, and hardware-accelerated apps run at near-native efficiency out of the box. Toolbox works the same way but is more tailored for Fedora/rpm-ostree systems, while Distrobox is distro-agnostic and more flexible.
Thank you for the detailed reply, much appreciated!
Any rough edges you've encountered yet? Like using USB peripherals, or networking shenanigans? I'm assuming it's using the host network driver by default, and maybe bind mounting
/dev/bus/usbfor USB pass through?Think I'll really dig into distrobox today.
No problems so far, but I didn't try anything USB-related. Two of the more interesting programs I use it actively for are Ubuntu distrobox for Ultimate Doom Builder (level editor, works with GPU) and toolbox for natpmpc (utility for port-forwarding). I made a systemd service on my host system that calls
toolbox run natpmpc -a 1 0 tcp 60 -g "$GATEWAY" 2>/dev/nullin a loop to establish port-forwarding for my ProtonVPN connection (running on the host ofc), parses the assigned port and calls qbittorrent's web api to set forwarded port there.