I’d like some recommendations as a beginner in the virtualization space for good GUI software for running vms for both experimentation and server use.
I’ve used virtualbox on Windows before but are there any better alternatives on Linux? I hear a lot of praise of QEMU but this seems to be only terminal based like what you do with containers.
VMware workstation is free but again, I’d like to know your thoughts on other good beginner options.
Thank you advance and have a good day/afternoon/night
Virtual Machine Manager is a great GUI frontend for KVM/libvirt and QEMU, and basically the gold standard for VM management on Linux
Cool thing is it also supports management through ssh, so you can use it as a server orchestrator if your needs don’t require something more involved like proxmox
Gnome Boxes has worked pretty well for me.
I am a huge fan of proxmox, since I first tried it out.
It does a little bit more than just VM’s.
On my home server, I have the proxmox distro running as the only service on bare metal, and then all other work is done in the VM’s.
I use virt-manager. Works better than virtualbox did at the time (back while v6.1 was still the main release branch), it’s easier, and it doesn’t involve hitching yourself to Oracle.
VMWare may be “free,” but it ain’t free. And if you don’t care about software freedom, why choose Linux over Windows or MacOS? Also, Workstation Player lacks a lot of functionality that makes it not good as a hypervisor. Only one VM can be powered at a time, and all the configuration is severely limited. Plus the documentation is mediocre compared to the official virt-manager docs.
I tried virt-manager, but I still prefer Virtualbox myself
Literally just an opinion and people are down voting you for it
Why
Alongside many others, I agree that using QEMU through GUI frontends like virt-manager or GNOME Boxes, or even server-focused solutions like Cockpit+VM plugin or Proxmox layered on top of your installation.
I just want to note a decent point against other solutions like VirtualBox or the VMWare products that work on Linux: these solutions that don’t rely on QEMU almost certainly need the user to install out-of-tree kernel modules (that in some cases may also be proprietary). QEMU and its frontends don’t need out-of-tree modules in a majority of distros and can work out of the box with all features (given BIOS configuration of the host and hardware supports them).
I’m a Virt Manager guy, personally. The only thing is 3D acceleration is usually hard if not impossible in some cases without GPU passthrough. (Unless I’m wrong. I’d like to be wrong.)
