Let's Try Gnome Boxes | Hacker News Reader

Let's Try Gnome Boxes

glovesoff.substack.com

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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.

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

Clunky? More like spartan. I can't even set basic things such as port forwarding.

You can do a lot of things in Preferences --> Resources --> Edit Configuration.

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.

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

Windows Sandbox is an ephemeral VM with zero configuration that starts up to a blank Windows desktop in about 20 seconds on my machine. Boxes is just a simple VM configurator, its closest equivalent would be VirtualBox.

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.

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.

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

... And Windows 98 I'd hope.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

this has been my experience exactly.

I'd love to try this but I'm hesitant for fear that the developers decide to remove some feature that's critical to how I use their software down the line. Gnome is infamous for their drive-by function-follows-form design philosophy.

Their software appears to be designed elusively for the perfect ideal user.

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.

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...

I use Boxes on my work laptop, which runs RHEL 8; my employer has a preset for it that generates a Windows 10 Enterprise VM already fully configured in much the same way as a corporate-issued Windows laptop would be. I don't use it for much, but it does work pretty dang seamlessly for my purposes.

On my own machines I historically used VirtualBox, but I've lately been (re-)trying VMM on openSUSE (which is dead simple to setup from YaST, which has a button for "Install Hypervisor and Tools"; I simply checked the boxes for "KVM server" and "KVM tools" and it automatically installed everything I needed). So far I've been pretty impressed. I say "(re-)trying" because I've actually used that exact setup before for an on-prem server at a past employer, but running some servers in VMs is a fair bit different from, say, trying to put a Haiku or TempleOS desktop through its paces :)

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.

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

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.

Virtualization of Win on linux with GPU pass-through generally is not designed to be easy at all. It's actually disappointing.

Excellent! So good to see people building easy to use UIs that get you started with stuff like this. A lot of time you just want to get something simple done and this kind of UI is perfect for that.

I'd like a "Configure in VMM" button in boxes if it detects VMM installed, since they are just different front-ends for the same backend.

Ah, yes, GNOME simplicity: feature-poor, but hard depends on a complex tangle of bloated RedHatWare.

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