It's no news or secret that containers are good at providing multiple and different testing environments, or at offering a way of deploying apps and services that are completely decoupled from the host OS. E.g., spin up a distro X container, check if code compiles there (and dispose of it).

How about the opposite? I.e., having one (or more!) stateful and persistent environment(s), tightly coupled with the host and sharing as much information and configuration as possible with it. Why? Well for running that one app, which is only available for another distro, with just a click on a desktop launcher icon. Or for doing all kind of experiments, inside our development environment, without risking the stability and the consistency of the system. Well, yes, containers can do these things too. And in openSUSE, we have both toolbox and distrobox, that can make these examples, just reality!

In this talk, we'll explain what they are and how to use them for spawning development and application environments, based either on the same distro you have on the host or on different ones, and inside of which you still have all your file. A working space that, despite being containerized, you can access seamlessly from within GNOME Builder or open new terminals directly inside of it and create launcher icons for apps installed in there.

We'll offer (more) examples and show how this can be very useful, both on immutable (like MicroOS) and on "traditional" (like Tumbleweed) systems.