Regular containers also happen to work great for testing dotfiles.
Many years ago I added an install script to https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles to get set up in basically 1 command because I wanted a quick way to bootstrap my own system. I used the official Debian and Ubuntu images to test things.
Over the last few days I refactored things further to support Arch Linux which has an official Docker image too.
This enables being able to do full end to end tests in about 5 minutes. The container spins up in 1 second, the rest is the script running its course. Since it's just a container you can also use volume mounts and leave the container running in case you want to incrementally test things without wiping the environment.
Additionally it lets folks test it out without modifying their system in 1 command. Docker has enabled so many good things over the last 10+ years.
No place like ${HOME} https://dotfiles.gbraad.nl ;-). I went further and generate images to easily spin up development environments, based on bootc vms or containers.
Never stop tweaking. No computer can be called home until it runs your own set of aliases/commands.
Just glancing through your dotfiles, I was wondering why you use VcXsrv. WSLg has always been fine for me, and I've never heard of anyone trying to use a different X server.
I really like the idea of immutable Linux and bootable containers. My next project will probably be switching to bazzite. But I took a look at the Containerfile[1], and I have some big concerns about the fragility of their supply chain. It uses 20 different copr repos (granted, half are their own), and I didn't count how many packages. Best I can tell, none of the versions are pinned. They do dump a diff of all package versions in the release notes[2], but I wonder if anyone actually reviews it before release. All it takes is one vulnerability in one repo / package and you can enjoy your new cryptominer.
There's something nice about running Debian and having confidence in all the packages because they're built and maintained by the Debian team. Of course there are exceptions, but in my experience they're rare. The only non-standard repo I regularly use is fish shell, and the updates are so few and far between (and very public) I think the risk is low.
I suppose this isn't strictly a container-specific problem; you could add the repos and install / update all those packages yourself too. But being able to package everything up into a single file that you can then boot into as your OS means you're also packing all the supply chain risk.
Curious if anyone else shares my concern or if I should just put my tinfoil hat back on...
> It uses 20 different copr repos (granted, half are their own), and I didn't count how many packages. Best I can tell, none of the versions are pinned.
Contributor here, we've been working on this diligently over the past cycle (the rest of the org is mostly done, Bazzite is largest so we're only getting to it now). We're hoping to be done over the summer with published SBOMs and all that good stuff.
Nothing holds you from using bootable containers in the same way you use Debian and only use packages from the official Fedora repositories, starting from Fedora's bootc base images.
I agree with your concerns—at least, last time I looked.
I looked over their code, saw some things (I believed) I would do differently, and it was very easy to make my own personal spin to use.
After doing that, maintaining it, and using it daily for the last year I went back on some of my original choices. I feel much less critical of the decisions Jorge Castro made and it's probably time to compare and contribute if I can. Like, Homebrew on Linux ended up being way better than I expected. But some things I liked better my way. Say, including the signing keys for Chrome's 3rd-party repo statically instead of fetching them over the network. (Writing this from my phone I don't exactly remember how they do/did it.)
Overall, I'd recommend trying it yourself! It's been a ton of fun.
I switched from official Fedora images when I got sick of dealing with nonfree stuff like codecs and nvidia drivers. They have much more lightly modified images that are better as a base to build on. I use https://github.com/ublue-os/main (and https://github.com/ublue-os/hwe for an nvidia system).
Sometimes I wonder why there isn't more enthusiasm around theming. Chicago95[0] is popular, but I also love how Garuda[0] themes KDE. There's some small websites for downloading themes on various DEs, but most of them are a bit jank and it seems built-in support beyond basic things like accents aren't there.
The Gnome/gtk folks have been systematically removing theming capabilities for the last decade+ in the pursuit of an Apple-like philosophy towards ui. This has really killed a lot of theming because so many apps use GTK.
> Sometimes I wonder why there isn't more enthusiasm around theming.
My guess: because it is difficult to develop software that can be themed and it is difficult to create themes that look good. Not only is it high effort, but it has relatively low returns. Themes mostly affect how things look and, ideally, have very little impact on functionality. I say ideally since, when there is an impact on functionality it is usually a negative one (e.g. buggy behaviour). Contrast that to a window manager or compositor: while it won't affect the functionality of individual applications (ideally), it does have a fairly significant impact upon how one interacts with the desktop as a whole.
> Sometimes I wonder why there isn't more enthusiasm around theming
I can speak to this personally. I used to always tinker with various Linux desktops, themes, etc but nowadays I just use vanilla Ubuntu with zero theming modifications. There are two reasons for this:
1. Like others have said, theming is easy but consistency is hard. I've found that anything besides Gnome just turns into a shitshow where half your apps just don't theme properly.
2. It's a massive time sink. While I could create a very consistent theme, it would involve a massive time sink into dealing with all the edge cases. When I was in college and just used Linux "recreationally", I could justify spending a ton of time tinkering with my system and getting everything perfect. But these days I use Linux professionally so it's less about having a beautiful desktop and more about something that just works and gets out of my way so I can get my actual work done.
I should note that I still play around with other DE's and themes though I now do it all in VM's. I'm slowly building up my own theme stack on a Debian VM and once I get everything buckled up I might actually deploy and it use it on my primary machine.
I used to really enjoy theming and Riceing, but then I realised it was pointless: my monitor always looks the same, with a full screen IDE window covering up all my fancy themes
Until I can change the color and font of everything on Linux the way I can on Windows XP, I'll never take Linux theming seriously.
Seriously, just make GUIs. That is the solution to ALL of Linux problems. MAKE THE GUIs!!! I can't select the background color of panes from a color picker and instead I have to manually edit text config files and create folders inside dotfolders. Ridiculous. It's 2025.
Probably because it gets tiresome after a while, I used to be big into Winamp themes, back in the 90's there were plenty of Demoscene and gamedev sites with desktop of the day, and what not.
After a while it loses the appeal, we decide to just use whatever defaults get offered, finetune one or two options and that is it.
As the commentor that asked previously, "Is it really necessary to spin up an entirely new distro for an XFCE+GTK theme?", Blue95 makes much more sense in the context of bootc usage. I was completely unaware of bootable containers until reading this. Though I will admin I would still prefer something that can be installed easily over a base system. Perhaps see NsCDE[1] for an example. Great post!
Great, original article. I didn't notice at first that this blogger is the very same author behind Blue95: https://github.com/winblues/blue95
I used to love theming my desktop environment, but the joy faded when I realized the UI felt much more magical than anything I was using it for. Wonderful application of the tech, though.
I think most bootc-based systems keep /etc, /var and others. So, it is more like Nix without impermanence where you can atomically change/update/rollback your system, but keep some system state.
While this may be a nice exercise to learn bootc, shipping a whole OCI image, just because you wanted to put a couple files under /usr seems quite wasteful to me.
To put things into perspective, GTK themes, unless they bring lots and lots of bitmap images (which doesn't happen nowadays), rarely exceed a megabyte in size.
I guess one could spend less time learning how to package these as RPM packages and set up COPR to do just that, making OCI + bootc entirely optional (and yet you could build an OCI + bootc installing this package if you so wished!).
For me, the bootc project is one of the most exciting things happening in Linux right now. It would be nice if projects like Debian adopt it as one possible delivery format for those who prefer the atomic containerized workflow way of doing things. There is so much to be gained from a stability standpoint vs how things are done now.
Side note: Judging by what I see on Reddit, the ability to theme a desktop is one of the top reasons someone develops a personal interest in Linux to begin with, so no need to justify that in my book.
I am actually surprised how bad the actual state of the art is. I would expect modern OSes to be infinitely and easily themable and a thriving scene of OS theming to exist (and offer perfect retro revival themes alongside completely original and loosely inspired ones) but it apparently is not the case at all.
Barebones LXC is painful to even get it working. I have been using incus [0] for managing LXC containers. It is very lightweight and has a great cli, give it a shot!
nickjj|10 months ago
Many years ago I added an install script to https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles to get set up in basically 1 command because I wanted a quick way to bootstrap my own system. I used the official Debian and Ubuntu images to test things.
Over the last few days I refactored things further to support Arch Linux which has an official Docker image too.
This enables being able to do full end to end tests in about 5 minutes. The container spins up in 1 second, the rest is the script running its course. Since it's just a container you can also use volume mounts and leave the container running in case you want to incrementally test things without wiping the environment.
Additionally it lets folks test it out without modifying their system in 1 command. Docker has enabled so many good things over the last 10+ years.
gbraad|10 months ago
Never stop tweaking. No computer can be called home until it runs your own set of aliases/commands.
saagarjha|10 months ago
bagatelle|10 months ago
3abiton|10 months ago
kayson|10 months ago
There's something nice about running Debian and having confidence in all the packages because they're built and maintained by the Debian team. Of course there are exceptions, but in my experience they're rare. The only non-standard repo I regularly use is fish shell, and the updates are so few and far between (and very public) I think the risk is low.
I suppose this isn't strictly a container-specific problem; you could add the repos and install / update all those packages yourself too. But being able to package everything up into a single file that you can then boot into as your OS means you're also packing all the supply chain risk.
Curious if anyone else shares my concern or if I should just put my tinfoil hat back on...
1. https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/Containerfile 2. https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/releases/tag/42.20250417
jcastro|10 months ago
Contributor here, we've been working on this diligently over the past cycle (the rest of the org is mostly done, Bazzite is largest so we're only getting to it now). We're hoping to be done over the summer with published SBOMs and all that good stuff.
microtonal|10 months ago
samhclark|10 months ago
I looked over their code, saw some things (I believed) I would do differently, and it was very easy to make my own personal spin to use.
After doing that, maintaining it, and using it daily for the last year I went back on some of my original choices. I feel much less critical of the decisions Jorge Castro made and it's probably time to compare and contribute if I can. Like, Homebrew on Linux ended up being way better than I expected. But some things I liked better my way. Say, including the signing keys for Chrome's 3rd-party repo statically instead of fetching them over the network. (Writing this from my phone I don't exactly remember how they do/did it.)
Overall, I'd recommend trying it yourself! It's been a ton of fun.
Kudos|10 months ago
moondev|10 months ago
From your link, everything is pinned? So a theoretical exploit in a future release of package is not going to exist in this immutable release https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/releases/tag/42.20250417
OsrsNeedsf2P|10 months ago
[0] https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 [1] https://garudalinux.org/editions (screenshots don't do it justice)
WD-42|10 months ago
II2II|10 months ago
My guess: because it is difficult to develop software that can be themed and it is difficult to create themes that look good. Not only is it high effort, but it has relatively low returns. Themes mostly affect how things look and, ideally, have very little impact on functionality. I say ideally since, when there is an impact on functionality it is usually a negative one (e.g. buggy behaviour). Contrast that to a window manager or compositor: while it won't affect the functionality of individual applications (ideally), it does have a fairly significant impact upon how one interacts with the desktop as a whole.
_fat_santa|10 months ago
I can speak to this personally. I used to always tinker with various Linux desktops, themes, etc but nowadays I just use vanilla Ubuntu with zero theming modifications. There are two reasons for this:
1. Like others have said, theming is easy but consistency is hard. I've found that anything besides Gnome just turns into a shitshow where half your apps just don't theme properly.
2. It's a massive time sink. While I could create a very consistent theme, it would involve a massive time sink into dealing with all the edge cases. When I was in college and just used Linux "recreationally", I could justify spending a ton of time tinkering with my system and getting everything perfect. But these days I use Linux professionally so it's less about having a beautiful desktop and more about something that just works and gets out of my way so I can get my actual work done.
I should note that I still play around with other DE's and themes though I now do it all in VM's. I'm slowly building up my own theme stack on a Debian VM and once I get everything buckled up I might actually deploy and it use it on my primary machine.
amarant|10 months ago
wlesieutre|10 months ago
AlienRobot|10 months ago
Seriously, just make GUIs. That is the solution to ALL of Linux problems. MAKE THE GUIs!!! I can't select the background color of panes from a color picker and instead I have to manually edit text config files and create folders inside dotfolders. Ridiculous. It's 2025.
pjmlp|10 months ago
After a while it loses the appeal, we decide to just use whatever defaults get offered, finetune one or two options and that is it.
mfro|10 months ago
[1]: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
trollied|10 months ago
Surprised it's still going https://www.enlightenment.org/
robinsonb5|10 months ago
sabslikesobs|10 months ago
I used to love theming my desktop environment, but the joy faded when I realized the UI felt much more magical than anything I was using it for. Wonderful application of the tech, though.
pipes|10 months ago
undeniablemess|10 months ago
I guess the equivalent in the NixOS world would be its impermanence module, which erases root on every reboot to keep things as stateless as possible.
microtonal|10 months ago
WesolyKubeczek|10 months ago
To put things into perspective, GTK themes, unless they bring lots and lots of bitmap images (which doesn't happen nowadays), rarely exceed a megabyte in size.
I guess one could spend less time learning how to package these as RPM packages and set up COPR to do just that, making OCI + bootc entirely optional (and yet you could build an OCI + bootc installing this package if you so wished!).
sohrob|10 months ago
Side note: Judging by what I see on Reddit, the ability to theme a desktop is one of the top reasons someone develops a personal interest in Linux to begin with, so no need to justify that in my book.
qwerty456127|10 months ago
dicytea|10 months ago
I looked into it, but it looks like that you need to manually build the image and fiddle around with qemu.
JCattheATM|10 months ago
Containers are so easy so people just started using them for every use case, even when it doesn't necessarily make the most sense.
gigel82|10 months ago
One of the rare examples where "Dark Reader" not only failed but actually made it more light; there must be some funky CSS shenanigans going on.
concerndc1tizen|10 months ago
Havoc|10 months ago
Also discovered that for me it’s less the OS or paradigm or theme/look and more that the windows manager is tiling type.
udev4096|10 months ago
[0] - https://github.com/lxc/incus
JCattheATM|10 months ago
I also don't think the distinction between distro and container is murky at all.
zoezoezoezoe|10 months ago