I have been running Manjaro/Xfce on several systems for a few years and am considering a switch to EndeavourOS.
I started by installing EndeavourOS is a virtual machine.
Host is Windows 10 with VirtualBox 7.
Everything looks good except for the graphics performance which is slow as molasses compared to Manjaro running in another VM.
Both VMs are setup exactly the same. In both cases Display is configured with VMSVGA and 3D Acceleration enabled.
The Acceleration clearly isn’t working. In Manjaro I can slide a Firefox window all over the screen with no delay. In EndeavourOS it drags like crazy and can take seconds to catch up.
FWIW… what you see in any virtualization environment will vary from how things work on bare metal (based on my 10+ years of using Vbox).
Having run both EOS & manjaro on bare metal, I can say their speed, in my experience, is comparable. The environments are quite different. Manjaro is more for what I’d call “light touch users”… EOS is more terminal (read geek) centric. Me, I like EOS better, these days.
I used VBox, VMBare, QEMU/KVM and been with QEMU/KVM for the last 3 years. Everything I tried on it has been quick and flawless. I sure there is downfalls to it, but I have not noticed any. I guess it maybe a little harder to setup.
Any guide I saw for virtmanager, QEMU, & QVM opens with “yay -S 15 packages whose purpose is a complete mystery”, and I refuse to explicitly install packages whose role in this I don’t understand — I suspect I hardly need half of them.
Combined with the fact it’s one of the few things I can’t safely experiment with in a virtual machine (because nesting needs to be a controlled variable), and that deploying and testing VMs takes a fair bit of time and is exceedingly boring, it’s one of those things I’d like to do for extra performance compared to VB, but that would require at least a couple of full days out of my valuable free time to get to a point where I trust I understand what’s going on.
So yes, it’s harder to set up, and much harder to understand who does what, compared to VB’s “install one package; use the GUI; you’ve got a type 2 hypervisor”. Even the relationship between KVM and QEMU is not easy to grasp, with a mix of type 1 and 2, from what I understand. There is a lot of history and different projects behind it all.
That being said, since VB 7 has been and remains a disaster I’m inching closer and closer to the point where I’ll find it more efficient to just bite the bullet and take the time.
I have 2 machines 1 running Manjaro and the other running Fedora.Both have virtualbox installed and have EOS and Manjaro running as guests along with win10 on one and win11 on the other.I haven’t had any major issues and both Manjaro and EOS run about the same speed.But I guess as has already been posted it’s all in what we get used to.
I installed QEMU and Intel Haxm but could not get them to play together.
VMWare Player looks like the winner to me. Very easy to set up, it just works, and the guests appear to run fast and smoothly.
One annoyance with mouse handling as your switch between host and client windows. However, fewer annoyances overall that VirtualBox. Looks like I’ll be staying with VMWare long term.
QEMU looks like the way to go on a Linux host. But I think VMWare wins with a Windows host.
