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The original was posted on /r/linux by /u/disintegore on 2023-08-29 17:45:32+00:00.

I’m a software developer and I use my personal Arch desktop for work a lot. However, that means I often get distracted, and some of the tools that I use just don’t mesh well with rolling release. I would like to avoid dual booting as much as possible. I would also prefer isolation (ie namespaces, chroot jails, whatever) over virtualization.

I’ve been looking at things like VS Code dev containers and figured, why not extend this to the other tools that I use as well? What I am imagining is some sort of container or image of a fully functional desktop that I can spin up on the host machine. It would run in a separate TTY, run its own display server and share or take over peripherals with hopefully not too much fiddling.

However I’m not sure where to begin, or if it’s even possible. I know you can run full fledged Linux desktops in containers but the examples that I’ve looked at all use VNC/etc which is not desirable.