Boxes or Virtualbox without Guest Additions & Extpack?

Hi,

I’ve ordered a Librem 15 and I intend to run virtual machines on it. So I’d like to know the community’s opinion about this dilemma of choosing between Boxes or Virtualbox. Is Virtualbox, without its proprietary software (guest additions and Extension Pack), completely open source, as Boxes is? If so, why not Virtualbox? And what are the issues, if any, of running Virtualbox in a Librem Laptop if I also have no intention of making concessions about not using proprietary software? Thanks

I can’t speak intelligently on boxes vs virtualbox. Regarding the second half of your questions; I’ve only been running pureos for a little while, and I had to add a .list to sources.list.d and an associated preferences file in preferences.d to limit that source to only the apps I need for work. It is doable but not “ideal”. If you are not careful you can create hard to resolve issues doing this.

An easier way, if you don’t care about proprietary software, would be to run stock Debian and add the non-free repo. This way you aren’t making a frankenlinux that may be more difficult to work with later.

Hi, everyone. My laptop has come here in Brazil and I’d like to share my experience. It took 5 weeks since I ordered it on the purism website. I had to pay more 60% in customs taxes, but it was worth it. it’s exactly what I expected.

As an ex linux mint mate user, I prefer mate environment instead of gnome. So, I switched to mate just commanding apt-get install mate* and editing /etc/gdm3/daemon.conf to insert DefaultSession=mate.desktop.

I didn’t add any repository but the official, since I’m really committed to live a “new life” free of blobs.

I got a issue with the PCI graphics card, but nothing complicated. The videos was tearing, but after 5 minutes searching on the web I found out a patch for that.

Finally, I also decided to leave virtualbox and embracing kvm/qemu, all in name of privacy. I even think that Pure OS and boxes combined might be a better solution than Qubes OS.

Well, my next challenge is to achieve a better resolution and graphical performance to the boxes. Any Suggestion? I’ve tried to set up the guest xrandr to the same resolution of that of the host (3840x2160). It worked out once, I had even made a script for that, but eventually it stopped ( I got a error sort of CRTC 64). And the guest graphical performance remains much worse than in my old dell i5 running virtualbox. For me, it’s still impossible to watch videos on the boxes.

I’d appreciate if someone could help me out in this task.

Thanks.

Why not test Virt-Manager a bit? It’s fully-equipped in comparison with GNOMR Boxes I think and it’s also QEMU/KVM based.

I’ve already tried virt-manager. Actually I have both Boxes and virt-manager installed. I tested the given options for PCI, but nothing worked out. I’m considering to try looking glasses.

I suggest to ise virt manager, using qxl video and installing spice-vdagent give you a good performance if you want to browse or view youtube videos. Keep in mind that everything is emulated by cpu, so performance rely heavy on cpu power

I never used PCI-Passthrouh at all. I remember you must have an unused device to be able to connect it through that.