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Comment by prmoustache | Hacker News Reader

The rant about qemu/kvm at the bottom is weird. Has the author never heard of virt-manager or gnome-boxes?

    # create disk image 
    qemu-img create -f qcow2 win95.img 10G
    # install win95 from iso
    qemu-system-x86_64 -m 256 -hda win95.img -cdrom windows95.iso -boot d
    # boot the disk
    qemu-system-x86_64 -m 256 -hda win95.img

Now configure the network card on that thing

On most builds of QEMU, that command will start a VM with an e1000 card networked through SLIRP. It's the equivalent of something like:

  -netdev user,id=net0 -device e1000,netdev=net0

virt-manager/gnome-boxes haven't achieved the same mindshare as, say, virtualbox, so it is entirely possible.

I know when I took a break from VMs for awhile and came back, I found virt-manager about 3 days after I started trying to crack the nut of qemu/kvm from only the command line.

I as a CLI guy, usually have 2 or 3 open somewhere, I still find some CLI programs to be quite inscrutable. Pop it in a GUI though and suddenly the thing is dead easy to use. Have not quite figured out what triggers this response in me though.

I used to be a heavy CLI user when I was in college, after 10 years of professional experience I now prefer GUIs for most actions. For me the response you mention is automatic for every program with more than 10 CLI options. The longer the manual the easier is to just understand what to do in a GUI.

I only really prefer CLIs for two things: commands I use really often so I remember their usage and I can type the command faster than clicking the right things in GUI (e.g. "git rebase", "gh pr checkout", ...) and writing shell scripts, especially if I need to often do the same chain of actions, writing a .sh script saves a lot of time and mental energy.

For these reasons I especially love software which both has a good GUI and a good CLI, like VirtualBox for example.

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