Toolbx

This is particularly useful on OSTree based operating systems like Fedora CoreOS and Silverblue. The intention of these systems is to discourage installation of software on the host, and instead install software as (or in) containers — they mostly don't even have package managers like DNF or YUM. This makes it difficult to set up a development environment or troubleshoot the operating system in the usual way.

Toolbx solves this problem by providing a fully mutable container within which one can install their favourite development and troubleshooting tools, editors and SDKs. For example, it's possible to do yum install ansible without affecting the base operating system.

However, this tool doesn't require using an OSTree based system. It works equally well on Fedora Workstation and Server, and that's a useful way to incrementally adopt containerization.

The Toolbx environment is based on an OCI image. On Fedora this is the fedora-toolbox image. This image is used to create a Toolbx container that offers the interactive command line environment.

Note that Toolbx makes no promise about security beyond what's already available in the usual command line environment on the host that everybody is familiar with.