… 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.
I moved to virt manager from boxes as I it let me down too many times with bugs. VMs would not restart and snapshots would fail to launch.
I really like Boxes, but since it can only run VMs in the unprivileged qemu:///session, it simply doesn’t support features like PCI passthrough, autostart or even slightly sophisticated networking setups. :/
But, if you are lazy like me then https://distrosea.com/
Now I am curious. Is this really web-based? Who has tried it? How useful is it?
BTW, Gnome Boxes is available on Guix, too. (And of course you can run Guix in a VM).
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Also very handy to run tiny, outdated Windows systems with an app you can’t get rid off isolated from the net because it runs your grandpa’s heart-lung machine or so.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.
Boxes is very clean and functional. I even use it on Plasma. Great app
Someone else brought up Virt Manager here, which is my preferred; if you’ve ever used VirtualBox, you’ll probably be fine on Virt Manager. I like Virt Manager for using GTK3, as I’m in XFCE. I wouldn’t be surprised if both applications have similar settings, as they’re both LibVirt front ends, it seems.
Also, DistroBox, while a different sort of thing, is great for the sort of thing OP mentioned in that last paragraph. I usually just use command line, but there seems to be an unofficial GUI out there.
Gnome boxes even downloads the iso for you. We should recommend it for new users over the other ones.
Yeah, that was the point I was trying to explain - it is simple, and this can make it a good choice.
I run Bazzite which is immutable and rock solid stable. I use Boxbuddy which is a frontend for Distrobox to install packages from any distro when I can’t find it on brew.
