Virtualization on the Linux desktop—Gnome Boxes vs virt-manager

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  Yes, you can just install Gnome Boxes from Software Center-but I'm a sysadmin at heart; I used apt instead. [credit: Jim Salter ]

In the comments of our recent GhostBSD review, reader Enduzzer casually mentioned trying out the distribution in a Gnome Boxes VM. Linux's Kernel Virtual Machine has been a mainstay of my own system administration for more than a decade-but I use virt-manager, an excellent and deeply sysadmin-ish graphical management interface.

I generally describe virt-manager as "simple"-and in many ways it's much simpler than Boxes is-but there are different ways to interpret simplicity.

The integrated approach

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  We had good results with an Ubuntu Focal Fossa guest, running on our Ubuntu Focal Fossa host system. [credit: Jim Salter ]

Under the hood, Boxes shares the majority of its technical underpinnings with virt-manager: the libvirt virtualization API, the Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor, and the qemu generic processor emulator. Virt-manager exposes those inner workings as much as possible while trying not to get them unnecessarily in the way.

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