I’m a Fedora user and Distrobox just seems more complete as a project and the commands make more sense to me

Distrobox is directly inspired from Toolbx and was created because of limitations of Toolbx and how Toolbx’ maintainers didn’t want to implement some features at that moment in time.

Currently, Distrobox is almost a superset of Toolbx. Though, I’ve come to the understanding that Toolbx does better at some tasks.

If you would like to stick to just one of them, then Distrobox is probably still the better one and should be preferred. However, if its added functionality doesn’t do it for you, then please feel free to continue using Toolbx.

Why is toolbox preinstalled and not distrobox?

Because Toolbx predates Distrobox and is developed by developers that are associated with Fedora and even specifically designed in hopes of solving some issues pertaining to Fedora’s Atomic distros.

Why is toolbox preinstalled and not distrobox?

Because Toolbox is a Red Hat/Fedora project and Distrobox isn’t. Also, Distrobox is a much more recent project (2021) compared to Toolbox, which was developed back in 2018. When Silverblue came out, there was a need to make it easier to install apps, and thus Toolbox was born.

Since Toolbox is a Red Hat/Fedora project, it means that it’s officially supported, whereas Distrobox isn’t. Not that it means much from a community support/home use case of course, but that might matter if you’re an enterprise and you want support from Red Hat or official Fedora communities.

But both use podman behind the scenes so internally they aren’t that different, but you can think of Distrobox as a more distro-agnostic and user-friendly version of Toolbox. If you’re a home user then stick to Distrobox.

All of the universal blue images come with distrobox so I gotten used to that, it’s nice that you can export apps so they appear in the DEs application menu

I use toolbox: Distrobox is a pretty horrible shell script and deleted parts of my home directory when I tried that.

In the end I just pointed toolbox to a script named podman that just adjusts the setup to what I need, implementing the missing features I wanted that way.