Live data from Hacker News

Let's Try Gnome Boxes

glovesoff.substack.com

1–10 of 42 posts

Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#3

Boxes has a fantastically simple ui but, as was the experience of the author of this article, it is really easy to run into something you can't configure with it so you have to switch to virt-manager.

FWIW, I got leary of Gnome Boxes (probably because I usually need to run a commercial OS like Windows) and found myself pretty happy with quickemu/quickgui - https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickgui

Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#4

Boxes has a fantastically simple ui but, as was the experience of the author of this article, it is really easy to run into something you can't configure with it so you have to switch to virt-manager.

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 clock. I can reset it, but it doesn't set itself automatically. I can't even find reasonable documentation on the issue.

Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#6
I prefer to just use virt-manager. It is a more comparable alternative. Gnome Boxes is cool to showcase virtualization for people that might not have any experience, but it is very dumbed down. People are going to want to optimize their Windows virtualization and Gnome Boxes is not the best place to do it.

Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#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 and access remote VMs as well - which is exceptionally useful.

Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#8
post #4

Boxes has a fantastically simple ui but, as was the experience of the author of this article, it is really easy to run into something you can't configure with it so you have to switch to virt-manager.

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)

Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#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...

Re: Let's Try Gnome Boxes

#10

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.
Post reply on HN