Im new to Distrobox but I had gradually been trying to use my steamdeck’s native desktop mode (Arch) as my daily OS … One killer app that I wanted to use among others, is ‘Openboardview’ I understand this is also known as Boardview … I tried installing it natively but, after a few hours of failing to get it installed on Arch, I learned that even if I got it working, it would likely stop working due to the Steamdeck’s immutable OS
So I learned the very basics of creating containers for different distros like Fedora and Ubuntu, I understood this works around the immutable OS issue . Since changes made to these containers remains
So after I creating a ubuntu container 24.04.2 LTS (Noble Numbat) I experimented with installing apps, ‘Geany’ is an example given on the video guide , so typing ‘sudo apt install Geany’ does indeed install the app on the Ubuntu container . Also VLC was installed successfully using this method
However this is where my progress ended … Here on out I was unable to install the application I wanted.
Typing ‘sudo apt install openboardview’ just returns
openboardview is only available as a snap package to my knowledge but seemingly snapd does not run in your environment … is the container set up in a way that it runs the full OS including systemd or is it only set up as application container ? (snapd and snap packages heavily rely on systemd tooling and services, without it you won’t be able to install or run snaps)
try sudo systemctl start --enable snapd and see if it can start at all in that setup … if it fails (which is likely since it normally auto-starts on a clean Ubuntu, watch journalctl on a second terminal to see why)
There you got your answer, you won’t be able to use snapd in that kind of container (it is likely just an application container, not a system one) if you can make a full OS container (I dont know or have ever used distrobox, so I can’t really tell if it is capable to) it might work though …
