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Other Alternatives

This page provides some tips on alternative resources if you have any of the following objectives:

  • trying to run a GUI application that is NOT packaged for your Linux distro
  • installed software to have access to all of your desktop environment
  • seeking an isolation approach that also works without Linux

GUI applications

For desktop GUI applications, flatpaks are a more advanced and appropriate approach than regular OCI (Docker) containers. If the GUI application you want to run is available on Flathub (or similar source), you probably want to use that rather than running it from an OCI container.

You can still try to run GUI applications out of a container. Using the podman --network host option might be all you need to get your GUI application working to an acceptable level. You can also consider using convenient wrappers of Podman that have specific features to help enable access to desktop environments:

Full access to your desktop environment

Tools like distrobox and toolbx will by default grant full access to your desktop environment. Desktop features that work outside a container will probably work "out of the box" in a container created by these tools. In contrast, Podman will by default create containers that are highly isolated with limited access to the host environment. There's a fundamental trade-off between giving software full access so that desktop features automatically work vs running software in a contained, isolated system.

Author suggestion

When I want to access my full desktop environment from the shell command line, I don't run it in a container; I just run it in a regular shell session from a regular terminal window. I only run software in OCI containers that does NOT need full desktop access.

Isolation of macOS and Windows software

Most software development ecosystems evolve their own environment isolation solutions. Usually, they are language-specific, such as Python's virtualenv environments, or started out that way, such as conda, but now support many languages. One benefit of these isolation systems is they are cross-platform and can run natively on Windows or macOS without Linux. In contrast, Podman uses the OS-level virtualization approach of Linux containers. Linux containers are not as portable, but they offer a more extreme level of isolation.

You can also use hardware virtualization to run virtual machines (VMs) of Linux, macOS, or Windows on a desktop environment of a different operating system.