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VirtualBox 6.0 released

virtualbox.org

51–60 of 247 posts

Re: VirtualBox 6.0 released

#51
post #32
post #3

Be careful about VirtualBox Extensions which is non free on commercial environments. Oracle is hunting non compliance and VB provides them with lots of telemetry.

Uhm, this scares me a bit, how do you of you have the Extensions or not? Would be nice if the Windows Subsystem for Linux started officially supporting graphical apps or a full VM.

You explicitly need to install them and accept the license

Re: VirtualBox 6.0 released

#53

Is anyone using VirtualBox on the desktop? Specifically, to run Linux/macOS/Windows guests on a macOS host? Would you recommend it? Or is the best option VMware Fusion, Parallels, or something else?

I use VirtualBox in combination with gitlab-runner[0] to run macOS guests for ArchMac[1] CI package building, which works great. I also use it with docker-machine instead of Docker for Mac, for performance reasons.

For actually using a virtualised desktop I favour VMware Fusion which I found is the best between features, performance, and reliability (Comparison also includes Parallels which I'm not a fan of)

[0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/blob/master/docs...

[1]: https://archmac.org

Re: VirtualBox 6.0 released

#54

Avoid VirtualBox and becoming trapped in the non-free & personal use only extension by using one of the very decent open source alternatives Boxes[1] or virt-manager[2] [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Apps/Boxes [2] https://virt-manager.org/

You make a good point, but not a good recommendation. This is a Mac OS virtualization app, and your options are Linux only. Its an oversight, at best. I get that Apples messed up their evosystem, but that’s not this conversation.

Re: VirtualBox 6.0 released

#55
post #45

Is anyone using VirtualBox on the desktop? Specifically, to run Linux/macOS/Windows guests on a macOS host? Would you recommend it? Or is the best option VMware Fusion, Parallels, or something else?

I recently got a Mac and wanted to avoid the cost of Parallels, so I tried VirtualBox first. It was insanely slow. Like, I would be typing text into a VM and I would type a line, then wait and watch the characters appear. This happened on a 2018 Macbook Pro host with 32GB RAM. This happened on both Windows and Ubuntu guests. So, I tried Parallels and it was so fast I can't really tell the difference between the host…

I tried VirtualBox first. It was insanely slow

Colleague of mine has Windows running on VMWare on OSX and it's not much better. Also, but this might be because of the keyboard/OS/VMWare settings he uses, but when my muscle memory gets to work and starts using basic key combinations it feels like half of the time they are intercepted by OSX and do funny things, opening apps I don't want or switching desktops or whatever etc. No joy. All in all, of all non-commandline development experiences I ever encountered it's probably the worst. Parallels on the other hand was indeed more 'just works, get shit done'.

Re: VirtualBox 6.0 released

#56
I love how the website has been keep basically unchanged through the years. Its design is clear and easily navigable.

I hope it doesn't change.

Re: VirtualBox 6.0 released

#57
post #40

Too bad none of these two bugs has been fixed: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/9069 https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12597 (cannot use `sendfile` in nginx inside a virtualbox, due to an eight year old bug)

Yeah it's crazy that it's not fixed yet. About 5 years when I was using VMs for my development environment I remember that bug causing all sorts of issues with assets not loading correctly. It's also why I recommend people avoid Docker Toolbox like the plague since it uses VirtualBox under the hood. Either use Docker for Windows (if you have Windows 10 Pro), or roll your own VMWare Player (free) VM which doesn't have…

This might surprise you but neither of these 2 are bugs.

VirtualBox shared folders simply don't offer the guarantees of a local filesystem. They are not a local filesystem, they are network drives mounted as NFS, with the abysmal support and quirk that comes with that.

sendfile() doesn't work on network drives. it never did. the host is not aware of changes made to the remote filesystem from another host. it cannot see updated files unless it checks for remote changes.

Re: VirtualBox 6.0 released

#58
post #12

Is there anyone who could explain to me why virtualbox is still being developed? I don't mean that as an attack on the developers or the software but Oracle ruined pretty much all of Sun's software with VBox being one of the only two exception along with Java.

Define “ruined” to you. By my definition, oracle took something that was “ok’ish, especially when you didn’t want to pay and just had basic needs” product and have slowly chipped away anything that could be considered good for most.

They ruined OpenOffice and Hudson. Luckily those were hard forked by the communities.

Re: VirtualBox 6.0 released

#59
post #54

Avoid VirtualBox and becoming trapped in the non-free & personal use only extension by using one of the very decent open source alternatives Boxes[1] or virt-manager[2] [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Apps/Boxes [2] https://virt-manager.org/

You make a good point, but not a good recommendation. This is a Mac OS virtualization app, and your options are Linux only. Its an oversight, at best. I get that Apples messed up their evosystem, but that’s not this conversation.

VirtualBox is a cross-platform app. The user interface looks like Java to me.

Re: VirtualBox 6.0 released

#60
post #54

Avoid VirtualBox and becoming trapped in the non-free & personal use only extension by using one of the very decent open source alternatives Boxes[1] or virt-manager[2] [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Apps/Boxes [2] https://virt-manager.org/

You make a good point, but not a good recommendation. This is a Mac OS virtualization app, and your options are Linux only. Its an oversight, at best. I get that Apples messed up their evosystem, but that’s not this conversation.

No, VirtualBox is Windows, Linux, MacOS
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