Toolbox, the solution to cathook on any distribution.

[raphael-costa]

Quick Description: CONTAINERS

Toolbox takes the work out of using containers, by providing a small number of simple commands to create, enter, list and remove containers. It also integrates toolbox containers into your regular working environment, to make it easy for you to use them as an everyday development space.

I would like to suggest the use of toolbox to painlessly enable the installation of cathook on any distribution, there would be no further need to maintain an appimage with limited functionality, ever-growing dependencycheck scripts or even the effort to tell people to switch to Manjaro because their distribution is unsupported.

The Issue

Currently cathook maintains an appimage with limited functionality that does not work reliably (or at all), cathook maintains an ever-growing dependecycheck script that constantly generates problems and cathook developers constantly hear complaints about the cheat not compiling on distros A, B or C, these users are generally told to switch to Manjaro.

My Suggestion for Developers

https://imgur.com/a/VFNLavs

In the image above you can see Arch Linux running on a toolbox on Fedora Silverblue 35

https://i.imgur.com/SEjTgMN.png

In the image above you can see graphical applications are fully supported, I play the game on a Fedora Toolbox with no performance loss. In fact I only "installed" the Arch toolbox to prove the concept, a Fedora toolbox would be easiest as it is officially maintained by Fedora, the creators of toolbox.

It would work like this:

1. "Getting cathook" would show how to install toolbox, all major distributions have toolbox in their official repositories, even Debian as of version 11. This takes one command.
2. "Getting cathook" would show how to download and enter a generic Fedora toolbox image, Arch toolbox image is unofficial and even Arch itself provides a Fedora image instead of an Arch one. This takes two commands (create and enter).
3. "Getting cathook" would provide a link to a very simple configuration script in bash that installs steam, grabs the latest cathook and compiles it. Alternatively just a list of instructions on how to perform these menial tasks.
4. "Injecting cathook" would show how to open steam (just type steam in console) and how to inject cathook (just cd cathook-dir && sudo ./attach).

Eventually if anyone feels up to it an official cathook toolbox running on manjaro could be created and maintained, it isn't difficult.

Additional Context

Why not Docker? 'cuz this is easier, this is ridiculously easy to set-up. You install toolbox, you grab the image, you enter the image, you install steam and cathook as normal, then you launch steam and inject cathook, it requires zero technical literacy aside from the required to run commands in the terminal in the first place. There are only two practical problems.

1. You will have two separate Steam installations. Or not, you could just use the Steam on toolbox and uninstall the other one.
2. It takes two terminals (or tabs), one to launch steam, another to launch cathook. Or not, you can open steam in the background and redirect errors to null.

Toolbox obviously created this extra work as it is something you folks are not accustomed to but it'll make your lives easier in the long run.

[raphael-costa]

Additional info: As expected toolboxes can be easily backed up, it's just containers after all.

https://fedoramagazine.org/backup-and-restore-toolboxes-with-podman/

This means there is almost zero effort required, you just need to set up a toolbox once with cathook and steam installed and upload it. A bit heavy to download though.