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Let's Try Gnome Boxes

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Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#11
post #8
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works for what I need, but yes, if you need to configure something it doesn't support, it's a hassle. If you reconfigure it in virt-manager, Boxes will happily run the new config, until you change something else in Boxes, and then it will obliterate your changes. The one problem I have, and I can't figure out if this is Boxes or something else: If the machine suspends, spinning it back up again results in a wrong…

I believe https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... has decent docs on what to do here: - Run NTP in the guest - If at all possible, run the qemu guest agent, which can inform the guest to resync when it resumes from suspend - If available, use the "kvm-clock" clock source (but that's just a source of timing ticks, not of actual time, so it doesn't help a lot with suspend)

Fedora has chronyd installed by default, which is supposed to do what ntpd does.

I also installed the guest agent. This is one of those have-to-use-virt-manager things. It doesn't seem to fix the time, but then I have been running it from Boxes. Maybe that's why.

Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#12

Boxes seems to be trying to target a non-existent market - dumbed-down virtualization. At least in my experience, when I'm running VM's, I typically want a sane set of defaults backed up by the ability to customize to the maximum degree in order to replicate the target environment. Virt-manager does this exceptionally well, as the author correctly notes. Virt-manager also allows you to connect to remote libvirt hosts…

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-pro... same market that microsoft has been targeting since half way through windows 10

Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#14

Boxes seems to be trying to target a non-existent market - dumbed-down virtualization. At least in my experience, when I'm running VM's, I typically want a sane set of defaults backed up by the ability to customize to the maximum degree in order to replicate the target environment. Virt-manager does this exceptionally well, as the author correctly notes. Virt-manager also allows you to connect to remote libvirt hosts…

It continues an unfortunate UI tradition of mistaking "accessible" with "unconfigurable".

I'm always pretty mystified as to who they think the target audience is because it's either people who'll stay away from the advanced menu because they don't need it, or they do need it and either know it or know someone who'll know that feature they need to turn on for their use case.

It's the same brain damage that means Microsoft keeps putting more dialogue boxes between the system tray network icon and being able to see adapter TCP/IP settings in Windows.

Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#16

Boxes seems to be trying to target a non-existent market - dumbed-down virtualization. At least in my experience, when I'm running VM's, I typically want a sane set of defaults backed up by the ability to customize to the maximum degree in order to replicate the target environment. Virt-manager does this exceptionally well, as the author correctly notes. Virt-manager also allows you to connect to remote libvirt hosts…

It kinda looks like Parallels. I can see using it to trial funky operating systems? Before Steam, I'd have said it could be useful for playing windows games on Linux, but these days everything I want to play just seems to work.

Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#17
post #9

I'll be bluntly honest: instead of writing yet another virtualization thingy that nobody asked for, how about fixing long standing issues with the existing ones? Example I recently hit with virt-manager: external snapshots are not supported but UEFI is not supported with internal snapshots. The worst part? You'll find 5 year old SO posts about this...

These statements make no sense. One is a small and simple UI amd the other is deep technical issues with libvirt. The development of one has literally no overlap with your issues.

Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#18
post #9

I'll be bluntly honest: instead of writing yet another virtualization thingy that nobody asked for, how about fixing long standing issues with the existing ones? Example I recently hit with virt-manager: external snapshots are not supported but UEFI is not supported with internal snapshots. The worst part? You'll find 5 year old SO posts about this...

These statements make no sense. One is a small and simple UI amd the other is deep technical issues with libvirt. The development of one has literally no overlap with your issues.

Well, it turns out Boxes is older than I thought (more than 10 years old), but it also looks like it came out of Red Hat (where virt-manager also comes from), so there is still a choice of where resources are allocated...

Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#19

Boxes seems to be trying to target a non-existent market - dumbed-down virtualization. At least in my experience, when I'm running VM's, I typically want a sane set of defaults backed up by the ability to customize to the maximum degree in order to replicate the target environment. Virt-manager does this exceptionally well, as the author correctly notes. Virt-manager also allows you to connect to remote libvirt hosts…

Well, it's at least a market of one. I just wanna get Windows up and running as quickly and painlessly as possible so I can run that one piece of software. I run about 100 different containers, but I don't have a lot of use for VMs, and certainly don't want to spend all my time configuring and tweaking them. And Boxes even comes as a Flatpak, so I know I can always install it in seconds.

Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#20

Boxes seems to be trying to target a non-existent market - dumbed-down virtualization. At least in my experience, when I'm running VM's, I typically want a sane set of defaults backed up by the ability to customize to the maximum degree in order to replicate the target environment. Virt-manager does this exceptionally well, as the author correctly notes. Virt-manager also allows you to connect to remote libvirt hosts…

I like it, but it's hit or miss. When it works it works well, when something doesn't work you just won't get the VM to run with Boxes. But I don't do much serious stuff with VMs so it's often just what I need, click on the iso file and it boots.
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