GNOME Boxes Preparing To Deliver Much Improved Virtualization Experience
2026-08-03 15:29 UTC
GNOME Boxes lead developer Felipe Borges has been overhauling the application with a major rewrite and today announced the new beta release. GNOME Boxes has migrated to using the GTK4 toolkit and libadwaita. The new GNOME Boxes code can also handle installing Microsoft Windows 11 now without needing any manual workarounds for Secure Boot or TPM requirements.
The new GNOME Boxes code also introduces a VSOCK device for accessing VM contexts and other improvements. With the revamped GNOME Boxes, it’s also shifting to a Flatpak-first and only model for distributing of new GNOME Boxes releases.
Replies (6)
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@thestrike@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2026-08-03 15:36
Cool
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@brokenwing@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-08-03 15:45
Great. Love the improvement.
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@SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml 2026-08-03 17:11
This rewriting almost killed the project and I still fear for Bottles.
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@jollyrogue@lemmy.ml 2026-08-03 18:49
What was wrong with the old Boxes? It didn’t support containers or the more advanced features of libvirtd like virt-manager does, but it seemed fine for what it was the couple of times I tried it out.
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@IanTwenty@piefed.social 2026-08-03 19:09
A gave up with boxes many years ago as it would not restore vms from snapshot reliably, something I use a lot.
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@NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 2026-08-04 15:53
I will stick with Virtual Machine Manager. They both use the libvert back end and qemu, but gnome boxes is way too dumbed down.