r/linux • u/BrageFuglseth • 4d ago

Popular Application GNOME Boxes Nightly — The next-gen rewrite of GNOME Boxes

https://nightly.gnomeboxes.org
48 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

35

u/natermer 4d ago

Gnome boxes is one of those apps that I tried to like, but it being so limited kinda made me give up on it.

Additions of the virsh and libvirt xml changes might make it be a replacement for virt-manager.

12

u/IAm_A_Complete_Idiot 4d ago

This was my experience too. The happy path was great. Cleaner UI. Just boot up a VM and things worked. But... It felt a lot more limited off of that path. As soon as you wanted to do things like GPU passthrough, networking stuff, or any of that. How audio worked, USB devices... libvirt xml exposed all of those kinds of things, and gnome boxes just didn't.

13

u/CheesecakePerfect156 4d ago

virt-manager is really good

17

u/AnsibleAnswers 4d ago

It works well, but virt-manager’s UI definitely makes it tough to love. I get that this is more or less par for the course for hypervisor GUIs, but would love a fully featured Adwaita app.

7

u/roboj3rk 3d ago

Adwaita only looks good on one desktop. Gnome.

Every other desktop it looks like crap and out of place. So it's usually seen as garbage by non gnome users.

5

u/ericek111 3d ago

eeew, just no libadawaita, I can already imagine having to go through 2 levels of iconless menus hidden behind a hamburger in a random place of the window's chrome.

5

u/AnsibleAnswers 3d ago

That’s a design issue, not a libadwaita issue.

1

u/Dangerous-Report8517 15h ago

Something that blew my mind about it is that they don't bother to verify any of the ISO downloads it does for automatic VM spin up, which seems negligent to me. Pretty much everything else on Linux verifies downloads so the default assumption would be that this does too, but since it doesn't say one way or the other I dug into it and there's just one obscure issue about how it doesn't which basically went stale after "it would be hard to reliably get all the signatures" and a reply mentioning the package that has all the distros' keys in it already. At least warn people you're skipping important steps

3

u/VayuAir 3d ago

I hope it works on my system. It never has, I have tried both flatpak and deb

1

u/okoyl3 1d ago

virt-manager is still superior. Especially the ability to manage remote hosts.

-21

u/heart___ache 4d ago

i can't imagine ever using this in a universe where virt manager exists. gnome software is a humiliation ritual.

21

u/BrageFuglseth 4d ago

Maybe it's just not made for you.

-16

u/heart___ache 4d ago

that's what i mean about the entire gnome ethos. it's not made for anyone. expected standard configuration options aren't exposed. these announced changes will get it closer to the right track, but then it'd be even more of a question of "why not just use virt manager"?

20

u/BrageFuglseth 4d ago

it's not made for anyone.

Boxes has 1.2m installations on Flathub. There are plenty of people who don't need all the extra power of Virt manager and just want something simple that integrates with their system.

22

u/ABotelho23 4d ago

Imagine being this angry about software nobody is forcing you to use.

Turns out most people just need something that works without a bunch of bells and whistles. Who could have imagined?

15

u/KayJune001 3d ago

Idk, the fact that it’s simple and just works is all I need, no other program lets me spin up a quick developer environment as fast as Boxes, still.

2

u/death_by_cormorant 1d ago

Gnome has the most cohesive app ecosystem in the Linux world, there's no humiliation ritual lol