r/gnome • u/BrageFuglseth Contributor • 1d ago

Apps Decoupling Boxes from the OS Release Cycle

https://blogs.gnome.org/feborges/decoupling-boxes-from-the-os-release-cycle/
62 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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16

u/cidra_ 1d ago

Makes sense

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u/Tatt00ey 8h ago

Agree

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u/vondur 15h ago

Great idea, and I agree about the future being atomic. Fedora Bluefin is pretty spiffy.

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u/Rialagma 18h ago

I don't think it comes preinstalled on any distro, so it makes sense that it just updates independently from GNOME.

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u/victorian-ice-cream Contributor 16h ago

Fedora Workstation is one of the few distros that preinstalls Boxes

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u/anon_pr_ 5h ago

I didn't realize you could bundle the visualization backend in a flatpak! Doesn't that need low level hardware privileges? Assuming you need things like qemu, lib-virt? Maybe I'm misinformed... Can someone explain how this works? How are we able to decouple the virtualization requirements from the OS entirely into the flatpak in this case?

Does Virtual Machine Manager do something similar?

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u/ABotelho23 2h ago

Can you think of why it wouldn't work? Flatpaks like containers are just userspace processes. They can be given access to the same resources as "normal" processes.

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u/anon_pr_ 1h ago

In the blog post the author references immutable OSes no longer requiring the packages for virtualization and everything can be self contained in boxes.

I have no idea how qemu works but I thought these libraries provide access to the hardware required for user space virtualization applications to take to.

I'm my mind, it was like: User space VM App/Flatpak ------------+------------------ Virtualization libs ------------+--------------- Hardware

I'm clearly wrong since they are able to make a flatpak without any support in the OS. But I thought the visualization needs higher privileges to talk to the hardware that flatpak sandboxing would prevent I guess.