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

We're not sure we love Boxes' offer to act as a RDP/VNC/Spice/SSH all-in-one client for remote systems that have nothing to do with your VMs. Convenient—or confusing?

Enlarge / We're not sure we love Boxes' offer to act as a RDP/VNC/Spice/SSH all-in-one client for remote systems that have nothing to do with your VMs. Convenient—or confusing? (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

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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