Hacker News Reader

Comment by hxorr | Hacker News Reader

I hope they can come up with a solution integrated into KDE where you can have apps running on a VM but appearing as a native Kwin window... Would probably need a helper daemon running on guest OS.

I know a similar thing has been done before but would be great to have upstream support from a major DE

View on HN

You can get pretty close to this with VirtualBox, which is one of two reasons I'm still using it.

I have multiple VMs running on my laptop. I can attach an external display and resize the VM windows. When detaching the display, the windows all resize back down automatically. With shared clipboard and a few other niceties, each VM feels pretty close to a native experience.

I have single-application VMs (e.g., the one that hosts my daily-driver browser environment that I'm typing into right now); those run a lightly customized openbox environment and the application is full-screened inside the VM. Those really feel like a Qubes-like experience, like a native application but inside a VM.

I also have purpose-specific VMs. For example, anytime I get started on a new contract, I spin up a new VM for it. All credentials, dev tooling, files, etc. for that project are contained inside that VM. I typically set it up so that there are multiple virtual desktops on my host environment, but a single desktop inside the VM; alt-tab switches tasks inside the VM but not the host environment. So, it's easy to switch "into" the project VM, work there for a while as naturally as I would if everything were native, and then switch out again as needed.

I really really want to swap all of the VirtualBox bits out with QEMU or KVM, but those aren't quite as polished just yet -- despite VirtualBox's numerous and sometimes work-stopping bugs, and the ever-looming threat of Oracle's litigation team.

Surprisingly Windows support this with their WSL2. It caught me off guard when i tried to run "nautilus" just for fun.

ChromeOS also supports this, making the OS experience somewhat tolerable.

That's because WSL2 implements an X11 client and sets the DISPLAY variable. X11 network transparency does the rest. You can do the same on Linux, as long as you're to learn how X11 arcane permission system works.

Windows implements and X11 _server_ (the client in X11 jargon is the app, which if remote works on a remote server - yeah it's confusing. You can have the X11 server on a thin client showing data from an X11 client running on a remote server). They also added Wayland support, too.

The current architecture is wayland based, with weston and an RDP backend, and the Windows host running an RDP client. X11 apps run on Xwayland within WSL2, so ultimately rendered on the same RDP client.

`xhost +`

Problem solved

That requires a bit of hacking in general, it's not that easy to achieve that with closed source OSes. Windows supports that via RDP, btw.

You could maybe do something easier with debboostrap and chroot mounting without needing to waste resources on vm management.

I am not certain if this was the implication but Vms may not be just abot linux guests

Yeah - I just want to be able to run Office in my Linux desktop - I don't care if the windows VM instance takes an extra 8gb ram, I just want it to work seamlessly

microsoft has a monetary incentive to never allow that. although you can do something like that with rdp in xorg

Parallels does it on macOS and it works. Windows also provides a way to RDP individual applications so it's "just" a matter of the client hiding the seam.

that is what i said. the issue is that freerdp (which can do single window / application) only supports xorg - not sure about xwayland

Complete isolation = virtual machine

None of the current solutions support this. Only if you fallback to X11 forwarding, but then it's not going to be seamless because it requires setup on guests.

Happy to be corrected if I'm wrong, this was my conclusion last year when researching again this space (since we're talking about virtualization support, thanks again RedHat for deprecating SPICE /s).

I've read that it's possible in Windows' RDP, but haven't found a Linux client/server setup that supports that.

IIRC Parallels can/could do this (on a Mac anyway) but I can’t find the specific feature. You could like run Excel or something and it would be just the native Windows interface window, but on your MacOS desktop.

Parallels calls that "Coherence mode": https://kb.parallels.com/4670

> I've read that it's possible in Windows' RDP, but haven't found a Linux client/server setup that supports that.

FreeRDP has supported this for over 10 years as a client. I don't know about non-windows servers: https://files.catbox.moe/roso8c.png

It's also significantly more responsive than any libvirt framebuffer.

> It's also significantly more responsive than any libvirt framebuffer.

I was pretty bullish on SPICE last year, with hardware acceleration enabled it was great. Not game streaming software latencies, but the seamless host-guest VM integration and usb/smart card redirection where features that I really desired for my workflows.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com