Lovely piece of software, but if you turn off the lights and say “Extension Pack” 3 times, an Oracle lawyer climbs out of the screen and hits you with an audit.
It's also compatible with the native virtualisation stack which makes for extremely speedy VMs (boots in literally 1-2s, great performance overall - except for some lag on the GUI).
I tried to run Win XP on UTM on MacOS x64 about a year ago. it worked but it was many, many, (1000x) times slower than virtualbox or parallels. I didn't want to dig into it after wasting 2 hours. internet comments indicated that UTM is slower but hid the truth of how much slower it is. UTM doesn't work.
I've only run Windows (and not XP) on this a couple times so I can't comment on that much.
I have run x86 Win10 on UTM on an M2 Mac and didn't have performance issues but in fairness I didn't actually do much with it - mostly accessing thumb drives formatted with NTFS.
I do regularly run arm64 Linux on it though, and it's been quite stellar for that use case.
"great performance" is not a phrase to consider if you need to run x86 code on arm chips. Even with Rosetta 2 and the latest virtualization kit, unless you're running all arm code, it's so painfully slow.
(this also applies to any mac container solutions)
Often users only want QEMU, with a graphical interface on top. Libvirt is not just a graphical interface, but also an abstraction over multiple virtualization backends.
It tends to add complexity, while making more advanced usage of specific virtualization backends more difficult. Especially with its own configuration format based on XML.
Edit: Correction, libvirt is not the graphical interface, but entirely the virtualization abstraction. Virt-manager one of several interfaces.
I suspect they probably actively try to avoid people that only have one or two installs - there's not enough money in it & casual users are probably more likely to just abandon the product rather than try to get some crazy licensing deal approved with Oracle (I certainly would). So those users would be reasonably big timesinks with little possibility of phat commissions at the end of it.
Much better to make the initial inquiry & find out if their stalking horse of making VirtualBox free has meant it's landed in a large organisation where they might have many installs & they're much more likely to get a big payday for roughly the same amount of effort.
Why even bother going through a crazy licensing deal? They could just write a shrink-wrapped license attached to an online payment form like everyone else does. Only require talking to a sales rep if the quantity is above a certain threshold.
Oh wait, this is Oracle. They don't know how to handle amounts smaller than a few grand.
We got hit with that in reverse and management had to ban installing VirtualBox. Oracle waited around until we had 25 (or 50) installs and then started to demand a lot of money. In the end it was cheaper to just get more VMware Fusion licenses.
well the poster there wanted to buy a license, but was coerced by the oracle rep into using it without a license. (so they weren't going to use it unlicensed to begin with)
But it's all taking place in a sewer which inexplicably contains advertising billboards in central places. You'd rather be wherever turtles normally live.
True, but the extension pack isn’t really necessary these days for most people. It used to be required for usb 3.0 support but now that’s included in the base GPL package.
I'm running 7.0.10 and to share directories and clipboard data only the "guest additions" package is needed, which is free but closed source; no idea if they changed anything in newer versions though.
I would have migrated ages ago to fully FOSS alternatives, but every time I wanted to use a GUI interface to do something non trivial that would require more clicks on a shell (the above features, plus changing ethernet interface modes, etc), I had to struggle with the simple truth that the vast majority of FOSS developers don't have a clue when designing an UI that is not aimed at themselves but actual users (which would be also the case for a lot of other FOSS). There is simply no match, all FOSS virtualization GUIs are ages behind VB, and that hurts me because VB GUI is stupidly simple, but clearly very well thought when it comes to actual usability. People should realize that good interface designers aren't failed programmers, and there is a huge need for them, both in free and proprietary software.
I used to use virtual box simply because it was free and convenient, but I recently switched to KVM + libvirtd and holy smokes, the vms are running much faster,
A lot of my work is CPU bound on my hobby project (https://atomictessellator.com) and I have noticed a good 20-40% speed up, when you’re doing 10s thousands simulations a day, that’s a big difference.
Sorry virtual box, you’ll always have a fond place in my memory, but it’s time to retire you :)
UTM is one of the most impressive pieces of tech I've ever used. I was able to run Windows 3.1 on my M1 Macbook, which blew my mind given the sheer number of architectural differences between the two.
Depending on your use case, you’re probably better served by 86Box though.
Qemu emulates a somewhat generic x86 pc (and MANY other architectures) with a generic vga/vesa card, while 86box focuses on emulating 8088-late 90s computers, actual devices included, which means you will have better driver support at the cost of speed (but why would you need a windows 3.1 setup to run faster than on a 333Mhz Pentium II? :) )
Oh good gawd! You are a glutton for punishment. Did you have an actual need for running some piece of software critical to business, or was this for the sheer bonkers sense of "but does it run Doom" type of curiosity?
Do you use the command line tool? I tried that and it segfaults. I have been using UTM but not being able to manage the VMs from ssh in a pinch is frustrating.
not sure if this is what you mean; but you can make a backup file (ova) of your VM and it'll run on any platform that Virtualbox supports. As far as I know, qemu doesn't have an option like that, nor does VMWare Player. I don't know what Workstation does or doesn't have in that regard.
