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submitted 1 month ago by KarnaSubarna@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

GNOME Boxes lead developer Felipe Borges has been overhauling the application with a major rewrite and today announced the new beta release. GNOME Boxes has migrated to using the GTK4 toolkit and libadwaita. The new GNOME Boxes code can also handle installing Microsoft Windows 11 now without needing any manual workarounds for Secure Boot or TPM requirements.

The new GNOME Boxes code also introduces a VSOCK device for accessing VM contexts and other improvements. With the revamped GNOME Boxes, it's also shifting to a Flatpak-first and only model for distributing of new GNOME Boxes releases.

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[-] NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 13 points 1 month ago

I will stick with Virtual Machine Manager. They both use the libvert back end and qemu, but gnome boxes is way too dumbed down.

[-] JustEnoughDucks@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 month ago

You can't even access the LAN on gnome boxes. I searched for workaround for many hours but found no solution. Many of the solutions included modifying the box with VMM anyway.

Maybe boxes is only good for using Microsoft office...

[-] peskypry@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago

Agreed. VM frontends are supposed to be powerful and feature-rich. Dumbing it down was one of the stupidest ideas, any such project could make.

[-] IanTwenty@piefed.social 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I gave up with boxes many years ago as it would not restore vms from snapshot reliably, something I use a lot.

[-] eldavi@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 month ago

i REALLY needed this when my everything server was running since i managed it headlessly using vnc w a minimal installation of gnome.

virt-manager works okay, but it would be nicer not to have to install more than what's needed for a headless setup.

[-] jodanlime@midwest.social 14 points 1 month ago

You can use virt-manager over ssh, and you only need libvirt installed so probably already good if it's a vm host. It works better for me than a full gui over vnc.

[-] eldavi@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago

i tried that with x forwarding over ssh and it didn't work all that well; what's why i switched to vnc.

[-] Arsecroft@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

you can use ssh to forward the port and then use virt-manages locally to manage the remote server

[-] eldavi@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago

i gave that a shot too. it works, it's just that the vm management was only part of what i needed since it also controlled the sdn.

[-] jodanlime@midwest.social 5 points 1 month ago

Like arsecroft says, virt manager has this ability built into the application itself. You add another session to the ui and choose ssh. No X forwarding needed, no gui needed on the server at all, don't need the virt manager app on the server just the client. Cockpit also works as a web based ui.

[-] eldavi@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 month ago

NICE! i didn't catch that part and thank you for making me aware.

i did try cockpit and i had better luck with it too.

[-] jodanlime@midwest.social 2 points 1 month ago

If you give it a shot make sure you use an ssh key, it doesn't like passwords.

[-] eldavi@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

the server itself died a little while ago so it's going to be while before it try and i planned on using cli only to manage the vm's and the sdn's; but i'll give this a try before doing that.

[-] jodanlime@midwest.social 3 points 1 month ago

Hopefully the rebuild goes well!

[-] xthexder@l.sw0.com 2 points 1 month ago

Oh that's good to know. I've got roughly the same VNC setup with virt-manager, so I'll have to try it out. I would get rid of this VM if I could, but it runs CI for my Windows builds. Since I daily Linux now, it's the only way I'll know if I break MSVC.

[-] brokenwing@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 1 month ago

Great. Love the improvement.

[-] Cricket@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 month ago

I just don't understand some of the downvotes on Lemmy. It's happened to me too. I wrote what I thought was an entirely positive post without anything controversial and one person downvoted me. I wonder if this is some cultural thing that came over from Reddit.

[-] non_burglar@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

Is... Is this your first time on the internet?

[-] Cricket@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 month ago

Haha, no, but I guess I'm not jaded to it yet. Someone downvoted my last comment too. 😄

[-] thestrike@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 month ago
[-] SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 month ago

This rewriting almost killed the project and I still fear for Bottles.

[-] hirihit640@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 month ago

what's going on with Bottles?

[-] SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Bottles Next, the successor of the current Bottles is in development. Of course it's a Rust rewrite. 🤦‍♂️ The project has slowed down since then considerably.

[-] dieTasse@feddit.org 2 points 1 month ago
[-] voyage0@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 month ago

Not rust itself, it is a great language with lot of upsides. The problem is the rewirte part. A lot of projects underestimate the burden of rewriting your code from the ground up. A lot focus power on a "new and improved codebase" that is never finished while to old codebase isn't properly supported anymore due to the focus on the rewrite. Rust is just notorious for these kind of rewrites as ist a fast and memory safe language where a lot of developers see advantages for their project (sometimes rightly so).

[-] dieTasse@feddit.org 1 points 1 month ago

Ah, makes sense, thanks! I can imagine small projects must be careful. On the other hand if someone does it for fun and learning that is fine even despite the risk of not finishing :)

[-] SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 month ago

Heute nicht, Mann. Kein Bock auf den Scheiß.

[-] Batmorous@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Maybe a fork is in order by new devs who will do good with it

[-] mactan@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago

they also got distracted by a project rolling their own distro instead of focusing on Bottles. same fate has befallen lutris

[-] SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I may aswell ask here: suppose I have a bunch (like, a lot of them) of Wine / Proton prefixes managed by Botttles and want to move on with the least of hassle, keeping these prefixes and my preferences intact. Is this possible with some other solution? I'm not a strict gamer, my prefixes have more productivity applications than games per si. So I didn't look into Steam, Lutris, etc.

[-] mactan@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago

ive added existing prefixes to heroic without issue so far

[-] InFerNo@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 month ago

I avoid Bottles out of principle because one of the devs doesn't understand what open source means and harasses distros to remove older versions.

https://github.com/bottlesdevs/Bottles/issues/2345

Also referring to "inferior package manager" in that post.

Same dev harassed Mint for shipping Gnome Calendar in their repositories.

https://gitlab.com/linuxmint/pins/mint/gnome-calendar/-/work_items/1

[-] voyage0@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 month ago

The issue seems to be mostly about the support overhead from really outdated versions still shipped to the public. This seems to be a legitimate concern and why I avoid the distros in question myself.

The issue about "inferior" package managers is not that wrong as well. Version mismatches between dependencies is a big issue in development and why stuff like docker, nix and even atomic desktops are so successful.

I'm a big fan of the classical package managers, especially for my base system but the overhead on developers and packagers is definitely not negligible especially if they use pre release versions of dependencies like bottles did.

Lastly I completely get that you don't like the tone, the mint/home calendar issue was, while I get the concern, a hard read

[-] InFerNo@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 month ago

I'm not arguing any of that. Package maintainers are doing invisible and often thankless work. The way this person communicates really struck a cord.

[-] JamesBoeing737MAX@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Wow "the users are too stupid to deserve my package". What a dick take.

[-] jollyrogue@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago

What was wrong with the old Boxes?

It didn’t support containers or the more advanced features of libvirtd like virt-manager does, but it seemed fine for what it was the couple of times I tried it out.

[-] novafunc@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 month ago

The main issue is that old Boxes is based on SPICE. It was/is a Red Hat project, but they stopped caring for it and deprecated it. So old Boxes is built on legacy tech that will pretty much just bit rot over time.

[-] jollyrogue@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago

That makes sense.

That’s too bad. SPICE looked like a promising alternative to VNC and RDP.

this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2026
145 points (98.7% liked)

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