Lately, Ive been using distrobox for some programs, but kapsule has an interesting approach. However, every time Ive tried kapsule Ive run into issues installing packages because a mirror issue/download speed, so I haven’t been able to properly test programs on it. I was wondering if anyone is using it on a daily basis and how the experience has been so far.
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Do you mean when you just go into the kapsule and use pacman to install packages? I myself didn’t have any speed issues with this, but of course it could be network connection dependent.
That said, personally I’m less into the “pet container” pattern where the user does ad hoc package installs in the container. I prefer to make the setup declarative so I can reproducibly recreate the image. I’ve been experimenting with a couple of ways to make Incus / Kapsule-friendly images that way:
- Using the LXC distrobuilder tool to derive from existing images
- Using
mkosi, as is done for the predefined Kapsule images
At the moment I’m still playing around to figure out my preferred way of doing this.
That said, it’s not a done deal that Kapsule will be the long-term preferred approach in KDE Linux. @ngraham says:
To be honest, I don’t find Kapsule to work very well myself, and I’m not able to use it. It’s a very early project that has been in heavy development, though unfortunately that’s tapered off recently.
We may end up doing something else for our “how can experts extend the system” story.
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When I boot my KDE Linux I use my archlinux kapsule container daily to run google-chrome-beta (hardware accelerated with nvidia and with sound).
I documented that here: Kde-linux: how to: google-chrome-beta in kapsule container: hardware accelerated and with sound
I never had speed issues with installing packages in a kapsule container (images kapsule:archlinux and images:ubuntu/24.04).
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