 So today we're going to be talking about an application that comes so close to being the best thing I've ever seen that it just makes me both very happy and disappointed because this application that we're going to talk about today is just so close to being really, really awesome, but kind of falls just attached short. But that doesn't make it's not, you know, less awesome. It's still awesome. It's just not as awesome as it could be. So what a lead up to a video, right? So today we're going to be taking a look at box buddy. Now I am a certified distro box fanatic. I've talked about distro box in approximately 10 videos, probably I've talked about distro box a lot. I've switched from flat pack to distro box for the for the vast majority of my containerized applications. And I really, really like distro box, I've typed I've hyped it up a lot. One of the biggest complaints that I get when it comes to distro boxes that it's a terminal focused application. And by that really what I mean is it's a terminal only application. If you want to create a distro box, you do so in the terminal. If you want to launch a distro box, you do so in the terminal. If you want to export a application from a distro box to your host system, you do so in the terminal. If you don't like to use the command line to do things, distro box is very inaccessible for you and always has been. But today we're going to be taking a look at an application called box buddy. Now box buddy is a gooey front end for distro box. So you can imagine how like I'm really excited because this is freaking awesome. This is really removes the complaint that a lot of people have that aren't comfortable in the command line towards actually using distro box. Unfortunately, it's not quite there, but it's a really good start. So let's take a look at box buddy and let's see what it's all about. So this right here is box buddy. Now out of the box, unless you have distro box is available to you already created. This will look a little bit differently. So what it will say is that there are no distro boxes available. Would you like to create one? It will tell you to hit the plus icon up here at the top. Then you would be able to create a distro box. Now, unfortunately, we come right away to the first thing that is not working in this application. It's a big one. It's actually creating a distro box. This right here comes up. Just fine. You can name it. So let's name this Debian. And then if we go down and actually search Debian, you'll find Debian in the list of distro box images that are available. Now, if this were to work the way that I think it's supposed to work, this should be freaking awesome, right? Because one of the things that is really hard is to find all the images that are available. The distro box documentation has some, but it's not always updated. So for example, the last time I checked Debian 12 was not on the list, even though that image has existed for quite some time. So relying on the documentation to tell you what images are available is not always the best thing. So the fact that there's just a drop down of all the images that distro box supports, or at least the vast majority of them, is really cool. So I'm going to scroll down here. I'm going to find the Debian option. So right now there's a Debian 12 here somewhere right here. I'll just click that and I'll hit create. And then nothing. This is the most disappointing part of this entire application is that as far as I can tell, this does nothing. It doesn't doesn't actually work. What the hell do I know? You know what? That's seriously just total BS. I've tried this thing for an hour and now all of a sudden you're going to work. Thanks a lot. Just make me look like a fool. Why don't you? But remember what I said there at the beginning where this was a gigantic disappointment? I take all that back. You guys get to see how the sausage is made right there. Oh, good Lord. I should start over, but you guys are going to get to see it. So yeah, it works. What the hell do I know? I did, in fact, try that many times and it just sat there and spun and spun and spun. Now it's possible because this one that's actually already here, this arch one, I went and created that in the terminal. So it's possible that when there are no disturb boxes on the system, it won't work. Maybe that's the question or the problem. I don't know. Or maybe I was just doing something completely wrong. Maybe I chose the wrong image and it was just taking forever. That reason. I don't know. But I'm just going to go ahead and create a new user here. That's also not something that usually do in a, you must choose a longer password. You want to know? My password is very long and secure. It's better than DTs. I'll fight anyone who tries to tell me otherwise. So box buddy actually does work. So we might as well talk about it. So you can create your own disturb boxes right from the GUI, which is really awesome. So if we wanted to get out of this, I think we could just exit like so. And it would exit it, right? Now you can see a list of all your disturb boxes right here in the GUI. And the things that you can do with them are pretty neat. So if you want to update your box, you can do so. You can just go ahead and hit this button here. It will perform an update. If there are updates, it will do the updates. And if there's not updates, it won't go through. That time, there's error. Now, that's one of the criticisms I have. I'll talk about that in a minute. But, and that's actually a criticism that I know is actually there, that instead of the criticism that apparently was nonsensical, you can also view all the applications that are available on the disturb box right from a graphical list. And you can either run them or add them to your host machine by hitting add to menu. Let's just say you wanted to install the vaulty in a arched disturb box. You install it on arch, come back here to the graphical menu, and then you can just hit add to menu and it will then show up inside of your host machine's application menu. That's really awesome. Now, you still have to go to the terminal to install the stuff. So it doesn't solve all the problems, which we'll talk more about here in a minute, but that's still a thing that you'll have to do. Another thing you can do from here is delete the box. So those are the four things that you can do. You can create new ones. You can delete the ones that you've had. You can open them up in a terminal. You can upgrade them and you can view the applications that are installed inside the box. Those are the five things that you can do. There are no settings. Okay. So you don't have to worry about any settings. And that's it. The fact that you can create them, manage them all from here in a GUI interface is just spectacular. And the fact that I was wrong about the adding being broken is also better than anything that I've seen all day. The fact that it works is just chef-kissed. It's so good. So let's go ahead then and talk about a couple of the negative things that I experienced while using this, just to put them out there. So the first one is that this is not going to keep you from having to use the command line. As much as I hyped this up as a GUI front-end for Disturbox, really what this is is a GUI manager for Disturbox. You can manage your Disturboxes here. You're not going to get out of using the command line to do things inside of Disturbox. You still have to use the terminal to do all that stuff. So if you want to install an application, like the example I used earlier, if you want to install Vivaldi or Chromium or whatever inside of your Disturbox, you'd still have to open up a terminal, enter the Disturbox, or use this button here to actually, you know, get into the Disturbox. It'd take you here. You can, you know, pseudo, like so, and we would install that. And then you'd still have to do that here in the terminal. So if you're not familiar with the command line, Buddybox is still not going to be the 100% solution towards Disturbox. There's no GUI front-end for everything, unfortunately. There's still going to be a lot of terminal slash command line use, right? There's just no getting around that. So that's the biggest negative if you're looking for a 100% GUI solution. So the second one is actually a little bit more of a bug. If you go to upgrade your Disturbox and you hit this button and there's an error, if you watch closely, you'll see that there's an error there at the end. It gets to a certain point, it says there's an error, and then it closes the terminal, okay? That means when there's an error, you can actually see what the error is. That's kind of a problem. So if your upgrade errors out for some reason, like it often does in Arch when you haven't updated the key ring in a little while or at all, because that's what Arch does, because of course it does. Just to let you know you don't have to do that on OpenSUSA. Just saying that out loud. But anyways, if you have an error during the upgrade process, it closes the terminal immediately, you can't see the error. So that's a problem. It should have some permanence there to show you that there was an error, not just go away. So that's a bug. So those are the two real quote unquote negative things that I had to say about Buddybox. Other than that, it's really freaking awesome. So especially with creation and maintenance of your Disturbox, it's really, really good. So if you don't want to manage your Disturboxes from the terminal, you no longer have to. They're all going to be right here inside of GUI. And that's so cool. It's a very good beginning. So way back at the beginning when I talked about that feature being broken, I was kind of upset because it was one of the real big features that I was going to kind of tout because when you create a Disturbox in the terminal, you have to enter a command that looks like this. And that's not great. You have to find the URL and you have to name it like this. It's not great, right? So the fact that you can go up here to the plus and find all of the images you want right here in a list for you, that right there is worth anything anywhere because it's just so good. It gives you all of the images right here that you want. I would like kind of a search box instead of a scroll thing so I can just type in the thing and it just kind of auto fills it or whatever. So if I wanted to use void in my Disturbox, first of all, I didn't even know void was an option, but apparently it is. I shouldn't have to scroll all the way down to get to void. If I could just type in void, that'd be awesome, but that's nitpicking. The fact that that exists and I can just scroll down to the image that I want to use and name it and create it, that's spectacular. So my second favorite feature actually is if I were to install something from one of my Disturboxes, I can open up the view applications portion of BuddyBox and actually add it to the menu like I showed you earlier. I don't have to remember the flag or whatever it is to use Disturbox-export. It's just dash dash app, but I don't have to remember it anymore, it's just, I can come here, add it to the menu and it's there. That's awesome. Especially if you have a Disturbox that has a ton of applications that you've installed in it, you can just come here and add them to the menu. Now, I would like to see some things improve just a little bit. So first, when I have this added to the menu, I would like to be able to remove it from the menu from here. Apparently you can't do that, that's a little disappointing. Another thing that I would like to have seen is to actually be able to uninstall the application right from here. That'd be awesome. Now, I could see that being a little tricky, seeing as how that's not Disturbox-dependent, that's more dependent on the distro, so you'd have to know what distro it came from and then uninstall it using that package manager. So I can see how that could be messy, but for sure they could do the opposite of the Disturbox-export, they could just do the dash dash delete flag and allow you to remove that particular application, which they don't apparently allow you to do right now. So you would have to go and do that on your own inside of the terminal, which is just kind of a downside. So those are really my two favorite features of this whole thing. They're not perfect. The slowness that I experienced or expected experience, but didn't happen on camera was one thing, but the ability to actually manage the applications you have exported would be really, really nice, but that's not quite there yet. So overall, Buddybox is a fantastic application. Is it everything that you wanted to be in terms of a GUI? Probably not. There are still a few things that I think that they could add in terms of managing your Disturboxes, and I think that they will. They're still developing, the last release was like two days ago, so they're still pushing stuff out. From what I've seen, the developers are very responsive to issues and stuff like that, because they have no outstanding issues, and that's just kind of unheard of for any applications. So that's really nice. So I think that this is a very good start when it comes to managing your Disturboxes. Now, like I said, it's not going to solve the entire problem if you considered a problem, because the vast majority of your work inside of Disturbox is still going to happen in the command line. That's just the nature of Disturbox. Unfortunately, I don't think that there is a solution for that outside of like installing like a graphical desktop environment or something like that, where you could then manage everything graphically. I don't know. But if you were searching for a solution on how to manage your Disturboxes and you wanted a GUI solution for that, Buddybox is fantastic. It's really, really good, and I'm happy that I discovered it. So I will leave a link to the GitHub page down below. It's available on FlatHub. If you want to install it from FlatHub, you can also build it from source as a Flatpak as well. So that's it for this video. 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