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