- C++ 53%
- QML 45%
- CMake 2%
DistroRack - A Qt/QML-based GUI for Distrobox Containers
English | 中文
| CI | Build Status | CI Builds |
|---|---|---|
| deepin 25 | deepin 25 CI | Get Latest CI Builds |
DistroRack is a feature-rich graphical interface for creating and managing Distrobox containers on Linux, written in C++/QML.
Features
Note
The project is quite young, some of the features are still WIP.
- GUI for Distrobox container management
- Create, import, clone, remove containers
- Export/unexport apps inside containers to your host OS
- Qt/QML based GUI with optional desktop environment integration:
- DDE
- KDE
- Custom terminal emulator support with the following ones supported out-of-the-box
- deepin-terminal
- konsole
- kitty
- alacritty
- ..and more
Build
Once you cd to the project root, run the following commands:
$ cmake -Bbuild .
$ cmake --build build
Once built, binary will be located at /build/distro-rack.
To generate a .deb package, simply cd to the build directory and use CPack:
$ cpack -G DEB
Why another GUI for Distrobox
This project is heavily inspired by DistroShelf. I originally plan to port DistroShelf to deepin 25, but sadly DistroShelf requires a pretty up-to-date version of gtk-rs and libadwaita which requires a pretty recent version of gtk4-sys that deepin 25 might not be able to ship in the near future, thus impossible to build. While flatpak is available in deepin, using flathub packages are extremely hard if the end-user doesn't have a decent network, especially for deepin users who mostly live in China mainland.
By making a Qt-based GUI for distrobox, we bring the possibility to make it look more system-native on Qt-based DEs (mainly for DDE in this case, KDE is also supported as well, and fallback to a generic Qt/QML GUI for other DEs), and make it directly usable under deepin 25 with a simple dpkg -i (or maybe apt install in the future), without the need of fiddling with flatpak mirrors or proxies.
This project is also an experimental project to test if and how the LLM-based tooling could help in project development. I might write a blogpost related to this topic later.
Contribution
Beside feedback and code contribution, other contributions are also welcome!
Translation
Translate into your language on Codeberg's Weblate instance
Funding
License
DistroRack as a whole is licensed under MIT license. Individual files may have a different, but compatible license.