From what I gather, it’s very similar. They’re both containerization tools to install software in a container overlay (someone mentioned to me before that they both even draw from the same Docker images).
Toolbx environments have seamless access to the user’s home directory, the Wayland and X11 sockets, networking (including Avahi), removable devices (like USB sticks), systemd journal, SSH agent, D-Bus, ulimits, /dev and the udev database, etc…
I’m not familiar with the finer details, but here’s some example use cases.
ETA: Based on the examples, it reminds me of how NixOS uses nested shells to do things.
They are both just wrappers for podman(/docker). Distrobox is more feature rich, and is far better documented, but is closer to a collection of bash scripts rather than a fully cohesive program. Toolbx is… definitely something. Their only real claim to fame is being less “janky”? IDK, it reeks of NIH, and in my experience, it’s a lot more fragile than distrobox (as in, I’ve had containers just become randomly inoperable in that I can’t enter them after a bit).
If you want to be pedantic, technically, distrobox is a fork of toolbx before it was rewritten.
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