What’s your software/setup for running virtual machines on your Enos?
What’s your recommendation for someone running a 10 year old Laptop with 8 GB RAM? I want to try other distros like Fedora etc without dual booting.
Any tips/tricks or suggestions cor running VMs?
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Also worth checking:
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Don’t use virtualbox. That is my best suggestion.
If you want easy, use gnome boxes.
If you want flexibility and performance, use virt-manager
If you don’t mind proprietary software, use vmware.
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Why?
Normally my go to is virtualbox as it is very easy to use and am able to run it in the same screen resolution as my monitor and it self adjusts to fit on the screen allowing me to still have access to my host as i do not run it in full screen mode. I also do not like running any vm in boxes so for me this is the way i like to use vm.
I also use vmware-workstation which i can do the same set up with and it also works well.
Since being on EOS i have also used virt-manager qemu which i find i have to set slightly smaller resolution to make it work like the others.
All three are good in their own way but definitely have differences. They all work well when they are working properly. Sometimes on Arch there are issues with them as updates happen. I usually switch between them if that happens. I have been using virtualbox for a long time so i tend to use it the most.
I have tried Gnome boxes and i don’t care for it. But to each their own. If vm doesn’t work as good as my installed system then i don’t like it.
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Because Virtualbox hasn’t done a good job of keeping up and performance is substantially worse than the other solutions mentioned.
Compatibility is also often an issue since version 6 was released.
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Only problem is that for Windows 10/11 unless you’re doing passthrough of a GPU performance on the graphics side for virt manager and GNOME boxes is crap. Virtualbox is MUCH smoother in this regard if that’s a concern as spice graphics just sucks.
Otherwise yeah I agree for everything else
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I run my Windows VMs in vmware which is noticeably more performant than virtualbox.
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Definitely VMware is the best that way, someone newer might have a bit more difficulty with setup though. Virtualbox is pretty easy for quick VMs if you want decent graphics performance with little work.
That said I personally use Gnome Boxes as I don’t care and I prefer to use KVM/QEMU. Boxes makes basic VMs really easy.
I’m too lazy for all the other setup.
gnome-boxes
Done.
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I also use VMware for regular VMs, Android Studio for running phone apps.
I’m running many Arch based systems (but no Windows) in Virtualbox.
Recently (maybe many months already, can’t tell exactly how many) the Virtualbox VMs have been much more performant than ever before.
And this applies to VMs that have been created with the most recent versions of Virtualbox.
Older VMs (i.e. created with older Virtualbox versions) are much slower, but I use them too because I’m probably too lazy to create new VMs for them.
So I assume Virtualbox has made changes to the structure of a VM and/or their support files, and this has made new VMs quite much better (compared to old Virtualbox VMs).
Otherwise I like Virtualbox because it is easy to use. And the performance is (nowadays) good enough for my purposes.
Of course Virtualbox (as well as other rivals) has had real functionality problems. Currently they are solved, but soon enough we’ll get a new kernel series, so let’s see what kind of issues are ahead.
The last time I used it, it lost by a wide margin to KVM. Maybe it has improved the speed since then. I’ll post an old comparison: www.phoronix.com …
Yeah, Virtualbox used to be (in 2018 like the article) very slow, but is very much better nowadays.
The only way to be sure is install in a VM and compare.
Note that also hardware configuration may make some difference.
It depends.
But for experimenting, i definitely suggest Virtualbox or Vmware Workstation (or Proxmox if a separate machine is available).
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Why? Because only Virtualbox/Vmware Workstation/Proxmox have the ability to take snapshots. So you could take snapshots on the running System and restore it in secounds.
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Qemu/kvm/libvirt/vfio/virt-manager (how you wanna call it), isnt able to do that (not with the gui, and a lot of trickery).
For passthrough whole hardware compenents, 2) would be much better.
But like said, it depends what somebody wanna to do.
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If you end up with a Qemu/KVM solution, a good overview video for that:
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virt-manager has a snapshot tab and then you can click the button to take a snapshot.
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You can try the quick and easy way to run a VM box with Qemu and kvm, with ‘quickemu’ . It is in the AUR so installing quickemu and quickgui-bin would get you running fast, it even has Android, Windows, and MacOSX with the click of a button. You can find the github page here for more info https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu
Just an alternative because I find virt-manager to be daunting.
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Really? Wow. missed that totaly. since when? Nice! Thanks.
But i tried it, and didnt work 
:
Fehler beim Erzeugen des Schnappschusses: Operation ist nicht unterstützt: internal snapshots of a VM with pflash based firmware are not supported
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/asyncjob.py", line 65, in cb_wrapper
callback(asyncjob, *args, **kwargs)
File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/details/snapshots.py", line 237, in _do_create_snapshot
self.vm.create_snapshot(xml)
File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/object/domain.py", line 1124, in create_snapshot
self._backend.snapshotCreateXML(xml, flags)
File "/usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages/libvirt.py", line 3063, in snapshotCreateXML
raise libvirtError('virDomainSnapshotCreateXML() failed')
libvirt.libvirtError: Operation ist nicht unterstützt: internal snapshots of a VM with pflash based firmware are not supported
So, it seems not to work with UEFI Machines.