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Let's Try Gnome Boxes

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Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#31

Post by rbanffy »

glandium wrote: post #10
0xbadc0de5 wrote: post #7

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'd argue virt-manager's UX is a little clunky, but that doesn't justify going that far.

I think it's a shame that Boxes doesn't show the VMs and connections I have setup with virt-manager on the same machine.

Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#32

Post by amelius »

Linux-Fan wrote: post #30
amelius wrote: post #26

Modern computing increasingly relies on the GPU, and it is disappointing to see that virtualization tools are lacking in this area.

You could also put it the other way around: Modern computing increasingly relies on virtualization and it is disappointing to see that GUI tools increasingly require GPU acceleration making them inaccessible inside virtualized environments.

Some tasks really require GPU, e.g. in high-performance computing and neural networks.

Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#33

Post by ColonelPhantom »

rbanffy wrote: post #31
glandium wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue virt-manager's UX is a little clunky, but that doesn't justify going that far.

I think it's a shame that Boxes doesn't show the VMs and connections I have setup with virt-manager on the same machine.

If you select the correct connection in virt-manager (iirc it's called something like "libvirt (User session)") then you will see your Boxes VMs, and vice versa a VM created under that connection will appear in Boxes.

Doesn't solve remote issues, but can still be useful if you want to e.g. set some advanced options for a Boxes VM.

Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#34

Post by int_19h »

Linux-Fan wrote: post #30
amelius wrote: post #26

Modern computing increasingly relies on the GPU, and it is disappointing to see that virtualization tools are lacking in this area.

You could also put it the other way around: Modern computing increasingly relies on virtualization and it is disappointing to see that GUI tools increasingly require GPU acceleration making them inaccessible inside virtualized environments.

Why would you want to embrace virtualization that throws away most of your compute power?

Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#35

Post by klyrs »

bhedgeoser wrote: post #28
klyrs wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Microsoft flight simulator 98 only works on xp

Somehow, I knew somebody was going to complain about a game I don't want to play :P

My nostalgia is perfectly satisfied by Dosbox. But now that you mention it, an old windows would run that copy of Paintshop Pro that I loved so much...

Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#36

Post by t0bia_s »

Las time I tried Boxes, Win10 in it don't have internet access. VM has no problem with that. However... Damn GPU pass-trough is so nerdy, that I give up and had to stay with Win as my main OS (because of Adobe that I would like to use on linux).

Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#37

Post by RealStickman_ »

t0bia_s wrote: post #36

Las time I tried Boxes, Win10 in it don't have internet access. VM has no problem with that. However... Damn GPU pass-trough is so nerdy, that I give up and had to stay with Win as my main OS (because of Adobe that I would like to use on linux).

Boxes really isn't designed to enable easy GPU passthrough. It requires a lot of additional configuration on the host system as well, not just the VM.

Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#38

Post by RealStickman_ »

int_19h wrote: post #34
Linux-Fan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could also put it the other way around: Modern computing increasingly relies on virtualization and it is disappointing to see that GUI tools increasingly require GPU acceleration making them inaccessible inside virtualized environments.

Why would you want to embrace virtualization that throws away most of your compute power?

It wouldn't throw away any power if the GPU makers decided to

1. Enable SR-IOV (or whatever their equivalent is named) for all GPUs, so people could split the GPU power as they wanted and allocate these shares to VMs

2. Continued to evolve SR-IOV to reduce overhead and allow more dynamic allocation of resources

Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#39

Post by WhyNotHugo »

0xbadc0de5 wrote: post #7

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…

VirtualBox worked for that same audience about 10 years ago. It was stupid simple to set up, and had pretty sane defaults. It's only gone downhill since, the last few times I tried, I couldn't even get it to work. I thank Oracle for this.

Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#40

Post by prmoustache »

XorNot wrote: post #14
0xbadc0de5 wrote: post #7

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 Micro…

What do you mean by "unconfigurable".

Gnome boxes on my distro has an "Edit Configuration" button that allows yu to modify the libvirt xml config.

I'd say it is more user friendly than virt-manager if you want to deploy quickly a vm to run a live environment. Also the ability to pause the vm automatically when not accessing it is nice when you just want a separate vm to access, say, your ebanking or want to run quick tests.

It is less user friendly than virt-manager if you want to do a lot of customization but it is still configurable as you get access to the vm xml file. So if you have a cheatsheet or a text file containing usual additionnal configuration you need it is just a copy/paste away.

I have virt-manager installed on my laptop but I still use gnome boxes when I want a vm for quick tests or specific dev environments, when I want to try out a beta version of a distro before committing to upgrade mine, or if I need to run some quick tests on a specific distro that I use somewhere else in a more critical environment.

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