Virtualization on the Linux desktop — Gnome Boxes vs virt-manager, Ars Technica

virtception –

We took Gnome Boxes for a quick spin — it has promise but needs more work.

: 406 am UTC







                                                                                            Yes, you can just install Gnome Boxes from Software Center — but I’m a sysadmin at heart; I used apt instead.                                                                                                        Jim Salter



                                                             I really like the Welcome Tutorial that Boxes gives you. It’s short, to the point, and exposes features you’d likely miss otherwise.                                                                                                        Jim Salter




                                                             The easy downloads is a pretty nifty feature — you don’t need to hunt down install ISOs; Boxes already knows where they are and will fetch them for you.                                                                                                        Jim Salter




                                                             The drag-and-drop functionality works as advertised — with a Linux guest and a Gnome3 desktop, anyway.                                                                                                        Jim Salter                                                      In the comments of our recent GhostBSD
review , reader Enduzzer casually mentioned trying out the distribution in a

Gnome Boxes

VM. Linux’s Kernel Virtual Machine has been a mainstay of my own system administration for more than a decade — but I use virt-manager , an excellent and deeply sysadmin-ish graphical management interface. I generally describe virt- manager as “simple” —and in many ways it’s much simpler than Boxes is — but there are different ways to interpret simplicity. The integrated approach

We had good results with an Ubuntu Focal Fossa guest, running on our Ubuntu Focal Fossa host system. Jim Salter

Dragging a screenshot from Files on the host operating system (right monitor) onto the Boxes guest (left monitor) immediately produces a “ready to receive files” notification dialog. Jim Salter

Ta-da! The screenshots we dragged and dropped from the host into the Boxes guest were copied, and show up in Downloads for the guest’s logged-in user. (It doesn’t work in the other direction — you can’t drag from guest to host.) Jim Salter

When we resize the Boxes window, the Ubuntu Focal guest within it automatically changes its own video resolution to fit. Jim Salter Under the hood, Boxes shares the majority of its technical underpinnings with virt-manager: the (libvirt) virtualization API, the Linux (Kernel Virtual Machine) (KVM) hypervisor, and the (qemu) generic processor emulator. Virt-manager exposes those inner workings as much as possible while trying not to get them unnecessarily in the way. Boxes approaches the same problem from the opposite direction — it abstracts away as much as possible, with no apologies for doing so. Boxes […] is targeted towards a typical desktop end-user who wants either a very safe and easy way to try out new operating systems or new (potentially unstable) versions of her / his favorite operating system (s), or needs to connect to a remote machine (home-office connection being a typical use-case). For this reason, Boxes does not provide many of the advanced options to tweak virtual machines provided by virt-manager. Instead, Boxes focuses on getting things working out of the box with very little input from user. This desktop-focused approach may begin with trimming away advanced options, but it doesn’t end there — Boxes offers quite a few usability tweaks that virt-manager doesn’t, and likely won’t. This effort at greater integration begins before a new virtual machine is even running. Most popular — and even not-so-popular — guest operating systems are available in Boxes as a built-in download direct from the source. Instead of needing to google “OpenBSD” to find a download link, a Boxes user can just start typing “open” into a search field and immediately see a list of OpenSUSE and OpenBSD versions.

The extra integration is most evident when running Linux guests (virtual machines), where virtio drivers are always available and libvirt integration is at a maximum. When we tested an Ubuntu Focal Fossa guest, the guest’s video resolution dynamically and automatically as we resized its window on the host operating system — and files dragged from the host’s file explorer onto the Boxes window were automatically transferred into the guest, where they showed up in the logged-in user’s Downloads folder. Easy mode isn’t necessarily easier

Clicking the plus sign begins the fun — time to install a new VM in Boxes. Jim Salter
                                                             I have to admit, the searchable distribution screen was cool. As I typed “open,” the list automatically populated with matching known distros.                                                                                                        Jim Salter
After Boxes downloaded OpenBSD 6.6, it popped up this review dialog with resource allocation defaults. Jim Salter
Clicking “Customize” doesn’t offer you much — RAM and virtual disk size only. You can’t control vCPUs here, or where the VM’s storage is here, its network stack, or anything else. Jim Salter
After clicking “Create” we’re off to the races. Behold — an OpenBSD installation! Jim Salter