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I run a full Linux desktop in Docker just because I can

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Re: I run a full Linux desktop in Docker just because I can

#61
post #60
post #56

You know, it's funny—I always hear people say they want to keep their Windows-only applications and run Linux alongside it, but I made the switch almost a decade ago and honestly can't say I'm worse off for it. And frankly, there's never been a better time to make that leap; the Linux desktop has finally hit its stride and become genuinely mature, with the polish and features one would expect from a modern operating…

I’m not OP but for me I end up having trouble with games and maintaining dual boot for it isn’t worth it. Most recently I was trying to install gamescope on PopOS LTS for retro gaming, but it was too old of a distribution for gamescopes dependencies, so I upgraded to Cosmic and it broke my software KVM. I use PopOS because it has great NVIDIA support and I’ve run into issues before with other distros. At that point I…

With Steam, I haven't seen a game that doesn't work yet. I was just playing Clair Obscur yesterday, it worked great. I don't know about Gamescope, but I think you can run whatever Windows thing you want through Proton and it'll probably work well.

Re: I run a full Linux desktop in Docker just because I can

#62
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ran into various issues I think, but my main objective was running a full k3s cluster this way, reckon this is achievable with full networking support now? Also if I already had colima setup, does new apple container provide any benefits beyond just being made by apple?

Try Orb docker. It is fast. It ha a Kubernetes cluster feature.

This thread is amazing - thank you all.

I’m surprised I didn’t stumble into any of these options, I searched and didn’t find.

Re: I run a full Linux desktop in Docker just because I can

#63
post #56

You know, it's funny—I always hear people say they want to keep their Windows-only applications and run Linux alongside it, but I made the switch almost a decade ago and honestly can't say I'm worse off for it. And frankly, there's never been a better time to make that leap; the Linux desktop has finally hit its stride and become genuinely mature, with the polish and features one would expect from a modern operating…

Not OP, outside of games I keep a dual boot pretty much exclusively for Visual Studio - imo it's one of the best debuggers I've ever used. I know gdb is just as powerful if not more, but it is so much less ergonomic, even with the different frontends I've tried. Edit and continue for C/C++ is such a killer feature too. I stick away from msbuild or using it as an editors it's purely my debugher.

Granted it helps that a lot of the time I need "advanced" debugging relates to msvc/windows specific issues, which while I could run it in wine, it's just easier if I'm on windows anyway.

Re: I run a full Linux desktop in Docker just because I can

#64
post #52
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WSL doesn't have an X Server, it has a Wayland compositor. That said, yes, you can use that. You can even run a different compositor nested so you get one single window with a desktop if you want.

Ah wayland. Many things changed since the time I've been using Linux in my professional work. However does Wayland support connectivity? I.e. can you display Wayland session on another computer via TCP/UDP? If not then Wayland won't work with wsl2 which is basically a VM

Waypipe[0] offers a Wayland alternative for sharing windows over the network.

[0]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe

Re: I run a full Linux desktop in Docker just because I can

#65
I’ll just leave this here, thank me later:

https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-webtop/

These images are top-notch, well documented, and have recently been refactored to use Selkies under the hood. Even with gamepad support, I’ve used these for running DOSbox, RetroArch, streaming video, and many other things.

There’s even a mature extensibility layer for using their images as a base layer to add services and apps.

Can’t speak highly enough of the linuxserver.io folks.

Re: I run a full Linux desktop in Docker just because I can

#66
post #9

I run Arch under WSL2 and then in ~/.bashrc: WINDOWS_IP=$(ip route | awk '/^default/ {print $3}') DISPLAY="$WINDOWS_IP:0" Now I can use the mighty mobaxterm from https://www.mobatek.net to just run whatever and pipe it back to Windows. One caveat is that the $PATH gets polluted with space characters by 'Doze, so I have to do something like this for QGIS: PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin qgis -n &

This is a much less efficient way of running Linux GUI apps over WSL since it will use software rendering.

WSL2 provides a GPU accelerated Wayland server. If your Mesa build (ver > 22) has d3d12 drivers you can use Windows DirectX as your OpenGL driver. Combined with the WSLg Wayland server you get near native desktop performance out of GUI apps.

Re: I run a full Linux desktop in Docker just because I can

#67
post #56

You know, it's funny—I always hear people say they want to keep their Windows-only applications and run Linux alongside it, but I made the switch almost a decade ago and honestly can't say I'm worse off for it. And frankly, there's never been a better time to make that leap; the Linux desktop has finally hit its stride and become genuinely mature, with the polish and features one would expect from a modern operating…

I absolutely love the direction KDE Plasma Wayland session is headed; I think it looks great, it definitely runs great, and it really is just packed with features. I do have some personal KDE gripes I'd like to work on, mainly just improving the KIO fuse integration more, but wow have things progressed fast.

Still, I caution people to not just jump to Linux. The actual very first problem is not software. It's hardware. Firstly, running cutting edge motherboards and GPUs requires a more bleeding edge setup than typical LTS distros give you; you'll be missing audio codec drivers and the GPU drivers will be missing important updates, if things even boot. Secondly, NVIDIA GPUs are currently in a weird place, leaving users with trade-offs no matter what choices they make, making it hard to recommend Linux to the vast majority of users with NVIDIA GPUs. Thirdly, and this one is extremely important, nobody, Nobody, should EVER recommend people run Linux on random Windows laptops. This is cruel and unusual punishment, and it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea even if Arch wiki says it works pretty good. It's a bad idea even if a similar SKU works well, or hell, even if a similar SKU ships with Linux out of the box. It's just a bad idea. The only two big vendors that even really do a good job here are System76 and Framework, and they still have to use a bunch of components from vendors that DGAF about desktop Linux. It is impressive that you can more or less run whatever desktop hardware and things usually work OK, but this logic doesn't apply to laptops. This point can't be stressed enough. I have extensive experience with people trying to switch from Windows to Linux and it's genuinely a challenge to explain to people how this doesn't work, they don't have the frame of reference to understand just how bad of an idea it is and learning the hard way will make them hate Linux for no reason.

Still, even with good hardware, there's plenty of software woes. You'll be missing VSTs. You might have to switch to Davinci Resolve to edit video, Krita to do digital painting, and Blender to do... Well, a lot of stuff. All good software, but a very non-trivial switch.

I'm really glad to see a lot more people interested in running Linux and I hope they have a good experience, but it's worse if they have inflated expectations of what they can do and still have a good experience with. Being misleading about how well Linux or WINE will work for a given task has never really helped the cause, and probably hurt it a lot.

I won't argue about Proton/Steam, though, that shit's miraculous. But honestly, a lot of people like playing competitive multiplayer games, and those anti-cheat vendors don't give a damn about your Linux, they're thrilled to start integrating Secure Boot with TPM attestation as it lets them try to milk more time out of the "maybe we can just secure the client" mindset. (I personally think it's going to die soon, in a world where ML has advanced to the point where we can probably do realtime aimbots that require absolutely no tampering with the client or the computer it runs on, but we'll see I guess.) But for me who doesn't care, yep, it's pretty good stuff. Whenever there's a hot new thing out chances are it already works on Proton; been playing a lot of Peak which was somewhat popular in the last couple months.

Re: I run a full Linux desktop in Docker just because I can

#68

I’ll just leave this here, thank me later: https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-webtop/ These images are top-notch, well documented, and have recently been refactored to use Selkies under the hood. Even with gamepad support, I’ve used these for running DOSbox, RetroArch, streaming video, and many other things. There’s even a mature extensibility layer for using their images as a base layer to add services and ap…

I actually wanted to try webtop for a long time, and did it only recently. I could not figure out these selkies for the life of me. It wanted a bunch of ports, was complaining about something all the time (don't remember, it's been a month). Might be a skill issue, but I've been using docker for the past 10 years. Moreover they want root access to the host system, which kind of defies one of the reasons to use containers. Is there a video that explains the benefits in a good way? I mean, if it's for gaming only, I can understand the use-case, but say you just want to run something like Gnu Radio in a container, why would I need 60 fps and root permissions for that.

Re: I run a full Linux desktop in Docker just because I can

#69
post #56

You know, it's funny—I always hear people say they want to keep their Windows-only applications and run Linux alongside it, but I made the switch almost a decade ago and honestly can't say I'm worse off for it. And frankly, there's never been a better time to make that leap; the Linux desktop has finally hit its stride and become genuinely mature, with the polish and features one would expect from a modern operating…

Not OP, but for me is the music plugin industry that almost never provides a linux VST. Some will work with wine, some won’t. But for everything else I’m on linux as well.

Even better, I have justification to buy yet more hardware synths I dont need

Re: I run a full Linux desktop in Docker just because I can

#70
post #40
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Samsung DEX had a Linux desktop package in 2018. It was a lxd container based on Ubuntu 16.04. They developed it in collaboration with Canonical. Unfortunately they deprecated it shortly after, maybe already in 2018. The next Android update would remove it. It worked but Android killed it mercilessly if it used too much memory or the rest of the system needed it.

I still remember how much I liked the idea. Really tried to use it, but the experience with both browsers and vscode was....not that great. Kinda hope they revisit this idea in a near future again

Google is implementing a full Linux VM in Android 16. This is probably how we'll get something similar.

https://www.androidauthority.com/android-16-linux-terminal-d...

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