… virtual machines where you only have to select which accompanying image of Arch / Tumbleweed / Ubuntu / Fedora you want to try.
In addition, the combination of a very stable base system (say, Debian or SuSE Leap) with a fast-moving, bleeading edge virtualized system (say, SuSE Tumbleweed, Arch or Guix) on top can be surprisingly useful. And because small virtual machines, when not running, are nothing else than files on your computer, you can have many versions of them, alter things, try stuff out, then delete it and go back to the tidy original state.
For example in Debian Bookworm:
https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/gnome-boxes
If you want a more complex way of creating and managing VMs, there is also virt-manager. But I feel that one is more suited for, say, professional use.
i suspect that virt-manager is a supplement since you can do everything via virsh.
That’s right, virt-manager is a GUI with many, many options. It is more tailored to run several VMs at once, give limited network access into or out of them, and so on.
Also very handy to run tiny, outdated Windows systems with an app you can’t get rid off isolated from the net because it runs your grandpa’s heart-lung machine or so.
I am not sure I would run grandpa’s heart-lung machine in a QEMU VM. Other than that, spot on.
now that i think of it, it’s more than a supplement because it makes the software defined networking MUCH MORE intuitive if you’re using KVM/QEMU.
Yeah. Makes it also easy to share files between host and VM via NFS, which can be handy when running cooperating desktop systems.
that too; i guess it’s wrong to call it a supplement when it unifies all these systems that seem disperate if you don’t already know the kvm/qemu ecosystem.