Multiple Distribution Support in blendOS is no Gimmick

I initially thought the ability of blendOS to run packages from multiple Linux distros might turn out to be a gimmick but I was wrong.

I generally prefer to use Arch Linux for its bleeding edge packages but I wanted get a VS Code with PowerShell environment also set up and that’s easier and more supported on an Ubuntu LTS release. Ubuntu LTS releases are usually a year or two old so they aren’t something I want to use for my daily driver OS. With blendOS, I don’t need to choose between one environment or the other though as the below screenshot demonstrates.

In the above, I’m running VS Code with PowerShell on Ubuntu 22 and the Haskell compiler on Arch Linux. It’s largely irrelevant¹ to me that they are running in different containers based on different distributions since they both share the same home folder and they are both launched via icons from my main OS.

I understand that a tool called DistroBox is doing most of the above magic so you could probably set it up on on any OS but I don’t know yet how much extra stuff blendOS does for you on the integration side.