Do you use VM on your machine
If so, for what purpose? Is it for experimentation/testing/exploration? Or, is it for work-related flow?
I use it to help test installs for the ISO and for experimenting with things and seeing what all is out there.
Mostly yes.
Also for fun?
I love the idea of being able to mess something up, delete the VM, start again and be up and running often in less than 20 minutes.
Yes, I know…use snapshots (in VirtualBox at least) and I also do that too when I am testing something over a longer period of time.
I use them to make it easy to connect to different VPN servers at the same time.
I use numerous VMs for various purposes.
Testing distros, isolated VPN environments, dedicated development environments, running Windows applications, etc.
I would if I could.
Same as @thefrog … Most recently I also used a VM to see how archinstall works from a scratch installation of vanilla Arch.
Self-education like this is a lot more productive when I’m not wasting a week trying to undo the damage I’ve done to my daily driver setups. VMs save the day. Screwed something up? Delete!
Sounds like some frustration… Have you tried?
Take a look here if you’d like some good guidance…
https://discovery.endeavouros.com/applications/how-to-install-virt-manager-complete-edition/2021/09/
I don’t think its a skill issue I believe its a hardware issue.
Yes as mentioned by @thefrog it’s a hardware issue for me. I used to use them all the time for helping with testing and trying things out before doing it to my actual system.
Got it. Thanks for the additional reply.
I made a VM yesterday with Ubuntu Server 26.04 to set up a LAMP stack as a way of honing my sysadmin skills. I got the LAP part and today I wanna get the MySQL/MariaDB part going and working. I wish I had a domain name to try doing reverse proxy stuff and access the server from the outside world too, but it’s not a big deal.
I use them a lot for experimenting, especially with several distros.
I use kvm+virt manager. I have several Linux distros, freebsd and truenas installed to see and learn. And I keep a Windows11 installation alive with kvm.
I installled QEMU/KVM and virt-mgr and as a test, I tried to install alipine 24.3.1 iso image.
Installing the base system worked AFTER opening some ports in the firewalld so the bridge to VM works. Then, I was faced with an issue, the 4GB virtual part was messed up and it did not expand to use the full 4GB. I run out of disk space when I tried to deploy kde plasma
Therefore, I deleted the VM and later I will start all over again.
Fwiw, I’ve always carved off a 20gig workspace for any VM instance. Seems to be ample sandbox without busting the bank. Of course, you get it all back upon deletion.
Does it impact performance much to not commit the space immediatly?
Good question. Frankly, I don’t know as I’ve never tried to skinny it down first and add later.
I now also wonder whether offering a generous starting space and then slimming it down later produces any surprises.
Since I don’t personally use my VM instances for anything serious in terms of ongoing production, they all feel like temporary dalliances rather than meaningful commitments of storage space over time.
My “go-to” setup is 20gb of diskspace and roughly half of my RAM memory (i.e., 8 out of 16 GiB). Always seems to run nice and fast without hitting any sides of the storage closet.
As I never worked with Alphine Linux before, It was confusing after it booted. Then,
I looked up what is Alphine Linux:
Alpine Linux is an independent Linux distribution based on musl libc and BusyBox (with OpenRC as its init system).
It is not based on major families like Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat/Fedora, or Arch in the usual derivative sense. Officially it is described as a security-oriented, lightweight distro built around musl (instead of glibc) and BusyBox (instead of the GNU core utilities).
Historically it began around 2005 as an embedded-oriented project that started from Gentoo Linux influences and was inspired by the LEAF Project (and related efforts like GNAP/Bering-uClibc). It later switched from uClibc to musl in 2014 and developed its own package manager (apk) and ecosystem, becoming fully independent.
In short: modern Alpine = musl + BusyBox (+ OpenRC), not a fork of another mainstream distro.