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.
Great. Love the improvement.
A gave up with boxes many years ago as it would not restore vms from snapshot reliably, something I use a lot.
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.
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.
i tried that with x forwarding over ssh and it didn’t work all that well; what’s why i switched to vnc.
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.
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.
If you give it a shot make sure you use an ssh key, it doesn’t like passwords.
I will stick with Virtual Machine Manager. They both use the libvert back end and qemu, but gnome boxes is way too dumbed down.
Agreed. VM frontends are supposed to be powerful and feature-rich. Dumbing it down was one of the stupidest ideas, any such project could make.
This rewriting almost killed the project and I still fear for Bottles.
what’s going on with Bottles?
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.
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
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
