EOS as virtual machine host

I’ve been running EOS for a bit now on a laptop and a spare desktop. I run the Plasma desktop (looking forward to the 5.24 overview!) and EOS is smooth as butter. I would love to migrate my other devices to EOS, but I do have a question.

I’ve successfully installed VirtualBox with all its packages on my spare desktop. I’ve spun up a few VMs and threw some other distros into it to test it out. It works beautifully so far.

Now to my use case question. I occasionally need to run Windows 10 for a couple of work apps that can only run on Windows. They are not intensive programs. How well does Win 10 generally run on VirtualBox? I can give it 4-8GB RAM, disk size is not an issue, and the i5 should handle it, but I’m mainly interested to know whether anyone has experience running Win 10 on VirtualBox with EOS as host and how it runs for them. Also, can Win 11 run decently in VirtualBox as well? Are there any VB settings I need to take into account for Win?

Thanks in advance for any info and advice.

Fine. 

Running Win 10 in VirtualBox on a i7-3632QM (2012 Sandy Bridge vintage) and have given it 4GB of RAM. It’s stored on a SSD, which from experience makes a big difference over a HDD. Runs fine (well as fine as Windows can :wink: )

In no hurry to try it, sorry.

Me too :smiley:

1 Like

I’m running various VMs including Windows 8.1 in virtualbox on an EOS host, all run pretty smooth. If you can dedicate 4 (8 would be better) GB RAM and 2 to 4 CPU-Cores to Windows 10 and run it from an SSD its should be pretty snappy (as far as Windows can get :wink: ).

1 Like

I’ve been running Windows in a VM for some time started with VB then I moved to QEMU/Virt-Manager. It functions well, enos as the host, If you could allocate 8Gb of RAM it would be better but it works with 4 Gb as well. But Windows will function as Windows as always and if you use an SSD it would be snappier.

I do it’s working but Windows 10 is still better when it comes to workflow and much other stuff we’re used to. As you can see most of the stuff they did with 11 is getting reverted back to mimic 10.

Excellent. I had this running for many years until I switched to vmware recently. vmware gives a little more performance for Windows guests and the support/performance for DirectX is much better with vmware. But virtualbox is just fine with Windows if it is only for office work.

I just recently set up a Virtualbox VM to run Win 10 for my Brother all-in-one printer and to use my Photoshop 6.0 suite. A little bit of a learning curve, as it’s probably been over ten years since I’ve used a VM.

Gees, as I read I got kind of confused about how your brother be an all-in-one printer :crazy_face: :rofl: . Then it dawned on me that you’re talking about Brother printers, not your brother :rofl: .

1 Like

Thanks for all the responses and experiences. I installed Win10 in VB, and it was okay but attaching a USB device was a bit clunky. Then I installed virt-manager and spun up a Win10 disk. Virt-manager was head and shoulders better for me. It seemed quite a bit snappier and attaching a USB device was a one click affair.

I think I’ll be staying with virt-manager for now so I can explore it and get used to it. Seems to be pretty good.

1 Like