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Comment by _8j50 | Hacker News Reader

I like QEMU a lot but VirtualBox is my goto because the cli commands work fairly reliably and simply and I'm ashamed to say the simplicity of the UX is compatible with my laziness. For server workloads KVM/Qemu is great but imho, Vbox or Fusion are the best in my experience.

Does anyone know if there are Qemu wrappers with a nice UI/UX?

My current use cases aside, it's amazing the number of nice use cases Qemu is made use of. GNS3 was my favorite when I used it many years ago (Cisco IOS).

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On the Linux side of the house, virt-manager is pretty great, though it leans much harder into KVM, so you don't necessarily get all the exotic architecture support of QEMU built in.

QtEmu for Windows gets you there, but it's very much so an API frontend, so if you're looking for simple from a choices perspective, this ain't it (though you might figure out your sane defaults and go from there).

Since you mentioned Fusion though, I'm guessing you're a Mac user, and UTM might be the ticket for you. The project started as a side-loadable/jailbroken device iOS VM system, but the project also makes a macOS app as well. https://mac.getutm.app/ This works both on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, though in order to get virtualization acceleration, it's best to run workloads built for your native architecture (ARM on AS, x86(_64) on Intel).

Thanks, I use both Mac and Linux as a host. Fusion is great for work stuff but in general I prefer VirtualBox because I can move around VMs to Linux.

First time hearing about UTM, I decided not to go the M1 route because I need to run X86 VMs, can it emulate x86 on apple silicon?

It can, it's slow as all get out though since Rosetta is a operating system level optimization, and doesn't apply in VMs.

> On the Linux side of the house, virt-manager is pretty great, though it leans much harder into KVM, so you don't necessarily get all the exotic architecture support of QEMU built in.

That's kind of funny because I end up accidentally creating non-KVM machines with virt-manager all the time...

On the Mac UTM is a nice wrapper around QEMU. They have a convenient gallery of preconfigured guest machines you can use and it's easy to export the QEMU cli command for any of the hosts you config in UTM if you need to.

https://mac.getutm.app

As far as I know, running UTM/QEMU is the only method so far to run an x86 VM on the M1 Mac.

It works reasonably well, but I wish it was easier to do things like device passthrough or adding additional networks. If you get into the Advanced mode, you can pass in QEMU command flags directly which is nice.

> Does anyone know if there are Qemu wrappers with a nice UI/UX?

Maybe overkill depending on your use case but that's what I consider Proxmox[0] to be.

[0]: https://www.proxmox.com/en/

What are your use cases? I have used to use UI/UX (virt-manager) in the past but finally just went for direct CLI on Qemu, because UI/UX is often missing some features. In most of the cases, you only need to build one optimized single command and then you can reuse it everywhere. Over time, you also learn options pretty well. Just save the command for somewhere.

“Does anyone know if there are Qemu wrappers with a nice UI/UX?”

What operating system are you on?

Linux and MacOS

Linux: virt-manager. Although it doesn't expose all the incredible features of qemu, it's great for "average" use cases.

UTM is very nice on macOS.

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