Boxes is a simple GNOME application to view, access, and manage remote and virtual systems.
Boxes is targeted towards a typical desktop end-user who wants either a very safe and easy way to try out new operating systems or new (potentially unstable) versions of her/his favorite operating system(s), or needs to connect to a remote machine (home-office connection being a typical use-case). For this reason, Boxes does not provide many of the advanced options to tweak virtual machines provided by virt-manager. Instead, Boxes focuses on getting things working out of the box with very little input from user.
This is free and open source software.
Features include:
- Select an operating system and let Boxes download and install it for you in a virtual machine.
- Download freely available operating systems.
- Automatically install CentOS Stream, Debian, Fedora, Microsoft Windows, OpenSUSE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Ubuntu.
- Create virtual machines from operating system images with a couple of clicks.
- Limit the resources (memory and storage) your virtual machines consume from your system.
- Take snapshots of virtual machines to restore to previous states.
- Redirect USB devices from your physical machine into virtual machines.
- 3D acceleration for some of the supported operating systems.
- Automatically resize virtual machines displays to the window size.
- Share clipboard between your system and virtual machines.
- Share files to virtual machines by dropping them from your file manager into the Boxes window.
- Setup Shared Folders between your system and virtual machines.
Website: apps.gnome.org/Boxes
Support: GitLab Code Repository
Developer: Felipe Borges
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
Boxes is written in Vala. Learn Vala with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
This article was written with the help of a site visitor who completed this form. Help the site by suggesting new open source software.
Related Software
| Virtualization Tools | |
|---|---|
| VirtualBox | Powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization software |
| Quickemu | Wrapper for QEMU that automatically “does the right thing” |
| QEMU | Machine emulator and virtualizer |
| Multipass | Lightweight virtual machine manager |
| Boxes | View, access, and manage remote and virtual systems |
| virt-manager | Desktop tool for managing virtual machines via libvirt |
| Incus | Secure and powerful system container and virtual machine manager |
| Quickgui | Gaphical user interface for the Quickemu virtual machine manager. |
| Kudu | Create and manage QEMU virtual machines from the terminal |
| Cockpit Machines | Web interface for managing virtual machines |
| Cassowary | Run Windows virtual machine on Linux |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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My program of choice for running virtual machines. I use the Flatpak version on Debian.
I’m currently compiling a roundup of these Type-2 (hosted hypervisors) which will include Boxes.