Following up on a recent post on Distrobox…
For those using VSCode with Distrobox, how do you all do it? distrobox wiki suggests two approaches: flatpak + dev containers and running vscode from within distrobox.
Which do you prefer and why?
I’ve experimented with both and got both running with Wayland. Using the latter approach (vscode within distrobox), I couldn’t quite get the running instances to be recognized by GNOME shell as the same vscode app that launched it. It shows up as code-url-handler, and doesn’t share the same icon on the dash. The flatpak approach doesn’t seem to have this issue.
I faced this as well on KDE and got around it by creating a window rule to match it by window title and force a .desktop name to the vs code window, so it shows the correct icon on the taskbar. I wonder if there is a similar functionality on Gnome?
What do you mean by a “window rule”?
Here’s some info on it: https://userbase.kde.org/KWin_Rules
From the overview:
KWin allows the end-user to define rules to alter an application’s window attributes.
For example, when an application is started, it can be forced to always run on Virtual Desktop 2. Or a defect in an application can be worked-around to force the window above others.
I don’t use vscode so I can’t help too much beyond saying Distrobox is awesome and I’ve been using it for my headless dev machine for a few months and won’t go back to anything else.
What do you use it for?
I use VSCodium in Distrobox daily on Alpine Linux, and it works flawlessly. I don’t experience the problem you encounter but I use KDE Plasma which I suppose handles it differently.
I am however looking into slowly moving over to KDE’s Kate for development, my laptop really doesn’t like opening multiple chrome instances for the various instances of VSCodium and then also an Android emulator on top of that.
