[0xbadc0de5]

Boxes seems to be trying to target a non-existent market - dumbed-down virtualization. At least in my experience, when I'm running VM's, I typically want a sane set of defaults backed up by the ability to customize to the maximum degree in order to replicate the target environment. Virt-manager does this exceptionally well, as the author correctly notes. Virt-manager also allows you to connect to remote libvirt hosts and access remote VMs as well - which is exceptionally useful.

[XorNot]

It continues an unfortunate UI tradition of mistaking "accessible" with "unconfigurable".

I'm always pretty mystified as to who they think the target audience is because it's either people who'll stay away from the advanced menu because they don't need it, or they do need it and either know it or know someone who'll know that feature they need to turn on for their use case.

It's the same brain damage that means Microsoft keeps putting more dialogue boxes between the system tray network icon and being able to see adapter TCP/IP settings in Windows.

[prmoustache]

What do you mean by "unconfigurable".

Gnome boxes on my distro has an "Edit Configuration" button that allows yu to modify the libvirt xml config.

I'd say it is more user friendly than virt-manager if you want to deploy quickly a vm to run a live environment. Also the ability to pause the vm automatically when not accessing it is nice when you just want a separate vm to access, say, your ebanking or want to run quick tests.

It is less user friendly than virt-manager if you want to do a lot of customization but it is still configurable as you get access to the vm xml file. So if you have a cheatsheet or a text file containing usual additionnal configuration you need it is just a copy/paste away.

I have virt-manager installed on my laptop but I still use gnome boxes when I want a vm for quick tests or specific dev environments, when I want to try out a beta version of a distro before committing to upgrade mine, or if I need to run some quick tests on a specific distro that I use somewhere else in a more critical environment.

[pkulak]

Well, it's at least a market of one. I just wanna get Windows up and running as quickly and painlessly as possible so I can run that one piece of software. I run about 100 different containers, but I don't have a lot of use for VMs, and certainly don't want to spend all my time configuring and tweaking them. And Boxes even comes as a Flatpak, so I know I can always install it in seconds.

[alpaca128]

I like it, but it's hit or miss. When it works it works well, when something doesn't work you just won't get the VM to run with Boxes. But I don't do much serious stuff with VMs so it's often just what I need, click on the iso file and it boots.

[klyrs]

It kinda looks like Parallels. I can see using it to trial funky operating systems? Before Steam, I'd have said it could be useful for playing windows games on Linux, but these days everything I want to play just seems to work.

[bhedgeoser]

Microsoft flight simulator 98 only works on xp

[klyrs]

Somehow, I knew somebody was going to complain about a game I don't want to play :P

My nostalgia is perfectly satisfied by Dosbox. But now that you mention it, an old windows would run that copy of Paintshop Pro that I loved so much...

[boomboomsubban]

... And Windows 98 I'd hope.

[asojfdowgh]

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-pro... same market that microsoft has been targeting since half way through windows 10

[Kwpolska]

Windows Sandbox is an ephemeral VM with zero configuration that starts up to a blank Windows desktop in about 20 seconds on my machine. Boxes is just a simple VM configurator, its closest equivalent would be VirtualBox.

[WhyNotHugo]

VirtualBox worked for that same audience about 10 years ago. It was stupid simple to set up, and had pretty sane defaults. It's only gone downhill since, the last few times I tried, I couldn't even get it to work. I thank Oracle for this.

[glandium]

I'd argue virt-manager's UX is a little clunky, but that doesn't justify going that far.

[beebeepka]

Clunky? More like spartan. I can't even set basic things such as port forwarding.

[prmoustache]

You can do a lot of things in Preferences --> Resources --> Edit Configuration.

[rbanffy]

I think it's a shame that Boxes doesn't show the VMs and connections I have setup with virt-manager on the same machine.

[ColonelPhantom]

If you select the correct connection in virt-manager (iirc it's called something like "libvirt (User session)") then you will see your Boxes VMs, and vice versa a VM created under that connection will appear in Boxes.

Doesn't solve remote issues, but can still be useful if you want to e.g. set some advanced options for a Boxes VM.