Installing Poncho Wonky with Distrobox

#“What are you talking about?”

Poncho Wonky is a Secure Scuttlebutt client forked from Patchwork. From what I can tell, it’s the only client with active development in 2026.

Distrobox is a tool that exposes apps running in OCI containers to a user’s host. It isn’t meant for isolating processes the way the container engine(s) it depends on do (podman, docker, lilipod). Instead, it mounts the user’s $HOME volume and does magic like allowing the container to connect to the Wayland or X11 session. Distrobox will also export the apps and bins installed within it to the host so they can be accessed via the desktop’s applist or cli. It’s a great tool for when an app is packaged in a way that isn’t compatible with your system.

#“Why would you do this?”

Firstly, because it’s fun for me. There are other reasons I have to install Poncho Wonky in a distrobox; some of them are:

• Poncho Wonky isn’t compatible with many linux systems
  • No Flatpak available
  • No RPM available
  • In my view, AppImage is an outdated method for shipping linux software
    • Contrary to popular belief, it depends on system libraries (not portable despite marketing)
    • It’s dependent on features modern distros aren’t compatible with
    • It doesn’t support theming
    • See this excellent write up for more
• Signal, Proton Pass, and Proton Auth are distributed as RPMs and DEBs, not official Flatpaks
  • Community packaging is great, but for certain apps I’d rather install the official package myself
    • I already have a system for this so Poncho Wonky should fit in nicely
• Distroboxes can be made declaratively
  • I can store their definitions in my dotfiles repo
    • Easy setup of my apps on any distro
• yadi yada

In my case, I’m mostly doing this for fun. I’ve been running Fedora COSMIC Atomic since last fall. The distro is “immutable” which comes with malware resistence and easy snapshot recovery. The bonus for me is I think at some point the project may adopt bootc as it matures which might mean in a few years I could roll my own distro image without learning much more than I know now. TL;dr I put a lot of effort into being lazy.

Prior to using distrobox, I was using toolbx. However, toolbx has fewer config options and required that I write my own custom scripts to manage them. This didn’t work well for me. re: lazy. Last week I picked up distrobox and have been adapting to it quite well. However, Ponco Wonky didn’t fit in so nicely and I needed to learn about the distrobox assemble command to get it to work.

The frustrating thing for me about this was that toolbx seems to have better documentation than distrobox, but distrobox has more features. I think in part, toolbx is affiliated with Fedora and Red Hat somehow and AFAIK they are big sponsors of Flatpak. Adding some of the distrobox features to toolbx may have them competing with themselves. Enough editorializing speculation though…

#“Okay, so how did you do this?”

I have a distinct file for Distrobox configs for apps of deb or rpm package types. Since Poncho Wonky ships a deb file, here’s a snippet of the ubuntu-based.ini file I use to install it, the other apps are trimmed out:

[base-ubuntu]
## A baseline image for apps ##
image=ubuntu:24.04
init=false
nvidia=false
pull=false
root=false


[ponchowonky]
# Install Poncho Wonky #
include=base-ubuntu

additional_packages="libnotify4 libnss3 libnspr4 libasound2t64"
replace=true
start_now=true

init_hooks=PONCHOWONKY_VERSION="5.1.0"
init_hooks="wget https://github.com/soapdog/patchwork/releases/download/v${PONCHOWONKY_VERSION}/ponchowonky_${PONCHOWONKY_VERSION}_amd64.deb;"
init_hooks="sudo dpkg -i ponchowonky_${PONCHOWONKY_VERSION}_amd64.deb"
init_hooks="sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y;"
init_hooks="rm ./ponchowonky_${PONCHOWONKY_VERSION}_amd64.deb"

# Export to desktop
exported_apps="Poncho Wonky"         # Export the app
exported_bins="/usr/bin/ponchowonky" # Export binaries

To install (assuming distrobox is already installed on the machine), just run distrobox assemble create --file ubuntu-based.ini

Notice, to increment the version of the app I need to update the line init_hooks=PONCHOWONKY_VERSION="5.1.0" and run the distrobox assemble command above.

#“How do you use it?”

Now I just open Poncho Wonky from my app launcher on my desktop or I run ponchowonky from a terminal session on my host. From there, distrobox will boot the [ponchowonky] container (if it isn’t already running) and the app will open normally.

I commited this file to my dotfiles repo too. Down the line, if there still isn’t a flatpak, I may improve the init_hooks so whenever the container rebuilds it automatically grabs the latest version. Thanks to soapdog, the Ponchy Wonky dev, for reigniting work on an SSB client! I hope this post makes it more accessible to folks.