[thaumaturgy]

I virtualize most of my desktop environment. I wanted to go with KVM and virt-manager initially, since I'm mostly using a Linux host and Linux guests, but there were two important features I wanted and couldn't figure out how to get that way: encryption and portability.

Most of the VMs are encrypted, so I feel safe traveling with them. Various secrets are also encrypted, but the encryption of the VMs themselves mean that I don't have to worry about losing my device at an airport and someone else potentially getting access to things they shouldn't. There are schemes that make this work in virt-manager and KVM, but I didn't like any of them as much; I didn't want to rely on the host for filesystem-level encryption (see portability), and I have previously had a bit of trouble with full disk encryption, so I wasn't comfortable relying on that. VirtualBox essentially is also doing full disk encryption, but it's invisible to the guest and seems to be reliable.

For portability, I should be able to use https://www.vbox.me/ to install the VMs and a host onto a flash drive and be able to run any of my environments from any Windows host without additional installations. Haven't actually tried this yet (happily, I no longer have easy access to Windows machines!), but it was a big point in favor.

Most of my environments now get auto-configured through Vagrant: https://github.com/robsheldon/vagrantfiles, so I get some of the benefits of virt-manager that way.

I really don't love relying on Oracle for anything