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Comment by Kwpolska | Hacker News Reader

> We are also providing our own installer images for debugging and testing features. These images are meant for installation in a vm and require GNOME Boxes with UEFI support. We suggest getting Boxes from Flathub. os.gnome.org

What if I’m on Windows and want to try out the latest GNOME before making a decision to migrate to Linux? What makes Boxes so special? Is it really so hard to make your images usable with other common virtualization tools?

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I don't think anything is holding you back from loading the ISO file in any other virtualization tool. https://os.gnome.org/

Tried booting it in Hyper-V, didn’t work. I got it to work in VirtualBox (although I had to switch to UEFI and make sure to select Linux as the OS) - and it’s not a live system, but a very dumb installer.

I think they mean that GNOME contributors can use it to debug and test features. If you want to evaluate it, you can probably best try out a distribution (e.g. Ubuntu if you want to go with popular, or Fedora if you want to get closer to the way GNOME intended it) that ships it.

Linux distros ship heavily modified versions of desktop environments, especially Ubuntu. Linux distros also typically do not ship the latest version on release day.

If you're merely contemplating whether to switch to Linux in the first place, I wouldn't worry about the latest version of Gnome - they're released every six months, so these changes probably aren't going to be the decisive factor in whether or not to switch.

I'd recommend Ubuntu if you don't really know much about Linux yet, simply because it's the most popular. It sounds like you do actually already know more and are interested in Gnome specifically, in which Fedora really doesn't modify it all that much. If you really want to try the newest Gnome release in particular, then waiting a month or so should give you a Fedora release that ships it.

I ran Fedora on an old laptop plugged into my desktop peripherals and began to realize that I wasn't using my Windows desktop anymore so I installed it on the desktop. My suggestion is to install it on another machine if you have one.

Fedora 38 (currently in beta) comes out in a month and will have Gnome 44. Fedora 37 is on Gnome 43. They tend to time their releases to include the latest Gnome.

Boxes isn't that special but it is built in, easy, and doesn't require privileges like virtmanager. I like it.

Better try out your distro of choice in a VM like VirtualBox or VMware, but even then, most distros perform way differently in VMs than they will on the bare metal your system happens to be using due to the different HW (emulated or not) and drivers.

Wtf? Can't you spin up a vm yourself and go through an installer? A desktop environment is not a distro, it's nice enough already that they provide some vm images. Btw afaik gnome boxes is simply a gui for libvirt.

Meanwhile, KDE has a really nice distro with the latest version: https://neon.kde.org/

Tried it a month ago. Seems it's gotten slower compared to kubuntu 1804. But still better than the subject.

You just use whichever virtualization tool you like. Boxes is one that ships with gnome on many distros, so it is easy to recommend. Nothing hard at all, I think you just confused a recommendation for a requirement.

I'm pretty sure you can install the images in just about any vm with UEFI support, and so that your rant is pointless.

They are just pointing out that in the case of GNOME Boxes, you need to have an up-to-date version.

> What if I’m on Windows and want to try out the latest GNOME before making a decision to migrate to Linux?

What are the odds that this is what you really want out of life?

Its GNOME Boxes and therefore the best and nothing else matters according to GNOME logic. This is the Desktop Environment in an ecosystem where the window manager draws the title bars that decided the app needs to draw the title bars so you can really easily get two title bars on a GTK app when used on not GNOME.

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