VirtualBox

★★★★☆

Good

Reliable, fast virtualization that runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris(!) hosts, and can run lots of different guest operating systems. You can adjust the virtual hardware in a lot more detail than you can with Boxes.

It supports 3D hardware acceleration, and runs Windows 10/11 VMs on Linux hosts much faster than the native KVM system (Boxes, Virt Manager, etc) can. (I can’t even get a Windows 11 guest to run on KVM.) It’s still not as fast at running Windows games as Steam/Proton, but Minecraft (Bedrock Edition) is actually playable in a Windows 11 VM on my Linux host!

I’ve mainly used the RPMFusion packages on Fedora, and it’s been solid. And unlike VMWare, I can actually find it.

Bad

It’s Oracle. That’s another whole post, but thankfully the core application started out as Free Software under the GPL. That makes it easy to package for Linux, hard for Oracle to completely enclose, and legal to use without giving money one of my least favorite tech companies.

Also, it can’t emulate different hardware architectures, and from what I can tell, it’s x86_64 only except on macOS, where it’ll run on either Apple Silicon or Intel (for now).

Ugly

The user interface.

Mouse integration works perfectly until it doesn’t (I had to turn it off for Minecraft, for instance), and then you have to look up the host key (Right-Ctrl by default) to get out of it again.

Some features, like virtual USB devices and disk encryption, require an extension pack, which is licensed separately, either as a paid add-on for commercial use or free for personal use.

Weird, but OK

“Seamless Mode” is supposed to display the guest’s apps as windows directly on your main desktop, instead of putting the entire guest desktop in a window. (Similar to Parallels’ Coherence or VMWare’s Unity.) It doesn’t work that way on my system, probably because I’m running Wayland, and instead it works as an almost full-screen view, but with the GNOME top bar still visible. It makes it a lot easier to switch between guest and host than running it full screen.