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GNOME Boxes Preparing To Deliver Much Improved Virtualization Experience (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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GNOME Boxes lead developer Felipe Borges has been overhauling the application with a major rewrite and today announced the new beta release. GNOME Boxes has migrated to using the GTK4 toolkit and libadwaita. The new GNOME Boxes code can also handle installing Microsoft Windows 11 now without needing any manual workarounds for Secure Boot or TPM requirements.

The new GNOME Boxes code also introduces a VSOCK device for accessing VM contexts and other improvements. With the revamped GNOME Boxes, it's also shifting to a Flatpak-first and only model for distributing of new GNOME Boxes releases.

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[–] 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I gave up with boxes many years ago as it would not restore vms from snapshot reliably, something I use a lot.

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    [–] 13 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I will stick with Virtual Machine Manager. They both use the libvert back end and qemu, but gnome boxes is way too dumbed down.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    You can't even access the LAN on gnome boxes. I searched for workaround for many hours but found no solution. Many of the solutions included modifying the box with VMM anyway.

    Maybe boxes is only good for using Microsoft office...

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    • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (10 children)

    i REALLY needed this when my everything server was running since i managed it headlessly using vnc w a minimal installation of gnome.

    virt-manager works okay, but it would be nicer not to have to install more than what's needed for a headless setup.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 months ago (9 children)

    You can use virt-manager over ssh, and you only need libvirt installed so probably already good if it's a vm host. It works better for me than a full gui over vnc.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (8 children)

    i tried that with x forwarding over ssh and it didn't work all that well; what's why i switched to vnc.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    Like arsecroft says, virt manager has this ability built into the application itself. You add another session to the ui and choose ssh. No X forwarding needed, no gui needed on the server at all, don't need the virt manager app on the server just the client. Cockpit also works as a web based ui.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    NICE! i didn't catch that part and thank you for making me aware.

    i did try cockpit and i had better luck with it too.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    If you give it a shot make sure you use an ssh key, it doesn't like passwords.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    Oh that's good to know. I've got roughly the same VNC setup with virt-manager, so I'll have to try it out. I would get rid of this VM if I could, but it runs CI for my Windows builds. Since I daily Linux now, it's the only way I'll know if I break MSVC.

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    • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    Cool

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    [–] 7 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Great. Love the improvement.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    I just don't understand some of the downvotes on Lemmy. It's happened to me too. I wrote what I thought was an entirely positive post without anything controversial and one person downvoted me. I wonder if this is some cultural thing that came over from Reddit.

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    • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (10 children)

    This rewriting almost killed the project and I still fear for Bottles.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    what's going on with Bottles?

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago* (4 children)

    Bottles Next, the successor of the current Bottles is in development. Of course it's a Rust rewrite. 🤦‍♂️ The project has slowed down since then considerably.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    they also got distracted by a project rolling their own distro instead of focusing on Bottles. same fate has befallen lutris

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)

    I may aswell ask here: suppose I have a bunch (like, a lot of them) of Wine / Proton prefixes managed by Botttles and want to move on with the least of hassle, keeping these prefixes and my preferences intact. Is this possible with some other solution? I'm not a strict gamer, my prefixes have more productivity applications than games per si. So I didn't look into Steam, Lutris, etc.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    I avoid Bottles out of principle because one of the devs doesn't understand what open source means and harasses distros to remove older versions.

    https://github.com/bottlesdevs/Bottles/issues/2345

    Also referring to "inferior package manager" in that post.

    Same dev harassed Mint for shipping Gnome Calendar in their repositories.

    https://gitlab.com/linuxmint/pins/mint/gnome-calendar/-/work_items/1

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    The issue seems to be mostly about the support overhead from really outdated versions still shipped to the public. This seems to be a legitimate concern and why I avoid the distros in question myself.

    The issue about "inferior" package managers is not that wrong as well. Version mismatches between dependencies is a big issue in development and why stuff like docker, nix and even atomic desktops are so successful.

    I'm a big fan of the classical package managers, especially for my base system but the overhead on developers and packagers is definitely not negligible especially if they use pre release versions of dependencies like bottles did.

    Lastly I completely get that you don't like the tone, the mint/home calendar issue was, while I get the concern, a hard read

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    • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    What was wrong with the old Boxes?

    It didn’t support containers or the more advanced features of libvirtd like virt-manager does, but it seemed fine for what it was the couple of times I tried it out.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    The main issue is that old Boxes is based on SPICE. It was/is a Red Hat project, but they stopped caring for it and deprecated it. So old Boxes is built on legacy tech that will pretty much just bit rot over time.

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