VirtualBox 6.1 Released With Better 3D Support, UI Enhancements

[shanedav4]

With the piddly amount of vram that they allow it makes no difference if they improve 3D support. They must allow at least 1GB or even more if they are serious about 3D support.

[pracedru]

VirtualBox is possible for a normal human being to use; libvirt is like operating the space shuttle.

Gnome-Boxes and Virtual Machine Manager both are pretty easy to use in my opinion.

[arQon]

VirtualBox has a huge number of "reasons" for its use, once you get past the mindset of "Well, on *my* machine, with my requirements, tool X / Y / Z does everything I need ..."

Decent cross-platform support alone is a massive win, out in the real world. Two companies that I worked with a few years ago that were developing firmware for Linux-based consumer devices did all their development in VBox VMs, with everyone running whatever their preferred daily OS was for mail / web / etc. It let them have a mix of Macbooks and Windows machines to keep everyone happy, while still having a development environment for their "real" work that matched their target.

As others have already mentioned, USB3 support and dynamic USB capture, seamless mode, 3D support - these are all killer features in their own right for many users.

For me, just being able to throw a VM on a USB stick when traveling is enough of a reason to keep using VBox: I have one for all my email, browsing, and other personal stuff. It takes literally a minute to back it up somewhere, and means I can keep DOING personal stuff when I'm out of town and only have the company laptop with me. (It also makes getting my personal stuff up and running again after OS installs etc an absolute joy compared to having to reconfigure 50 things each time).

Compared to screwing around with GPU passthrough etc, it's just a much better solution for anything "clientside". If you're running a bunch of servers, sure, go KVM. For anything desktop though, VBox wins by a mile, especially if you're running multiple host OS's.
Yeah, yeah, "Oracle is evil", etc. I don't care. I have things to do, and that means using the right tool for the job without getting caught up in irrelevant emotional arguments.

The 3D support is still pretty hit or miss, and in some ways has actually gone backwards thanks to the switch to VMSVGA, but it's pretty clear that the old 3D driver was falling apart and was never going to advance again (especially on Linux), so long-term this SHOULD hopefully produce better results overall. The rest of it though has been pretty solid for a long time now, and the performance hit for most tasks is so trivial as to not even be detectable unless you're actually measuring it.

[kobblestown]

VirtualBox is possible for a normal human being to use; libvirt is like operating the space shuttle.

Well, most people should be using virt-manager, rather than libvirt directly.

[bug77]

With the piddly amount of vram that they allow it makes no difference if they improve 3D support. They must allow at least 1GB or even more if they are serious about 3D support.

You won't be able to do much 3D work (why would you, in a VM), but it could allow you to get a 3D accelerated desktop...

[starshipeleven]

Yup, the only (but really compelling) reason to use VirtualBox are its 3D support and its mouse integration support.

What's wrong with KVM/QEMU mouse integration?

[starshipeleven]

VirtualBox is possible for a normal human being to use; libvirt is like operating the space shuttle.

libvirt is the library, virt-manager (the GUI application) is pretty much the same thing as Virtualbox or VMWare Workstation Pro, it just keeps things arranged slightly differently.

There is also GNOME Boxes which is a (suprise surprise) dumbed down GUI for VMs that is also a frontend for the same stuff.

[starshipeleven]

Virtual network shares, snapshots, USB 3, configurable vGPU RAM?

The only thing that is missing from virt-manager is virtual network shares.
Everything else works since at least a couple years (On Tumbleweed so using the most recent version, on LTS distros this of course isn't changed), and recently I can edit vGPU RAM too.

EDIT: network shares from virt-manager work fine for Linux guests, it's network shares for Windows guests that are kind of complex to set up and require manual intervention.

[starshipeleven]

VirtualBox has a huge number of "reasons" for its use,

most of those apply to KVM/QEMU/Virt Manager too.

Only seamless mode and multiplatform support (of course Virt Manager runs only on Linux hosts) don't apply to Virt Manager

Decent cross-platform support alone is a massive win, out in the real world.

True, but for real work in a real company in real world I much prefer VMWare.

Compared to screwing around with GPU passthrough

This is NOT required to get a normal VM with basic 3D support that does not lag at all.

The 3D support is still pretty hit or miss,

One of the reasons I prefer VMWare.

this SHOULD hopefully produce better results overall.

Yeah, but at this point why not going for the real deal (VMWare).

[Unklejoe]

Well, most people should be using virt-manager, rather than libvirt directly.

Not coming at you directly, but this statement alone is exactly why VirtualBox has an advantage.

Where is this documented? How is a regular user supposed to know this? It's easy to take for granted the amount of knowledge you may have.

Sure, I could spend a day or two researching how to "properly" do virtualization on Linux, or I could install VirtualBox and be done with it.