I’m doing a bunch of AI stuff that needs compiling to try various unrelated apps. I’m making a mess of config files and extras. I’ve been using distrobox and conda. How could I do this better? Chroot? Different user logins for extra home directories? Groups? Most of the packages need access to CUDA and localhost. I would like to keep them out of my main home directory.
By default it is just the packages and dependencies that are removed. Your /home/user/ directory is still mounted just the same. This puts all of your config and dot files in all the normal places. If you install another distro like Arch on a Fedora base, it also installs all of the extra root package locations for arch and these get left on the host system after removing the distrobox instance. So yeah it still makes a big mess.
You can mount any directory you want as the “home” directory of a given container with distrobox, it just defaults to using your home directory.
Do you happen to know what distrobox options there are for extra root directories associated with other distro containers, if there is an effective option to separate these, or if this is part of the remote “home” mount setting? I tried installing an Arch container on a fedora base system. Distrobox automatically built various Arch root directories even though the container should have been rootless.