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Comment by vardump | Hacker News Reader

VirtualBox just crashes all the time anyways. At least the few newest versions keep crashing when running Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04 LTS.

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This is a problem with Ubuntu and not VirtualBox. I spend a few hours today fighting with 24.04.02 in libvirt only to realize that they are using some fancy new GUI library for the installer which crashes on all VMs: https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000123893/manual-no...

Mandatory Ubuntu considered harmful.

If only NVidia considered Debian a first class distribution so I never had to use Ubuntu again.

I updated to the latest (7.1.8?) and that fixed the inability to use 3d acceleration. But yes I've found they have a terrible release "process" that seems to not include testing. I tried switching to VMWare but A) broadcom makes it difficult to download B) since a recent kernel/driver update on my host, even a fresh Windows guest locks up in boot (can't get through install).

Might try going back to qemu. VMWare had the best performance by far, though, which was great for windows only 3d model software. When with 3d acceleration Virtualbox is so sluggish for me.

  they have a terrible release "process" that seems to not include testing

I wouldn't say they have no testing process at all but it seems to me that they lack discipline when it comes to building releases and testing. I've seen releases that had debug-by-logging type code left in spamming the VM logs as well as breakage in what most would consider very common host + guest combinations.

It's a shame that Oracle doesn't seem to care much about the overall quality of that product. I guess we should be happy Oracle cares enough to still develop it. :-/

Edit: And right now - VirtualBox is still not offering v7.1.8 inside the GUI app and there is no mention of this CVE in the 7.1.8 change logs.

Yeah when I checked for updates in the GUI it found nothing. Had to download manually. Though actually I didn't update the extension pack. Doubt it'd help but I should check.

I’m using the latest, same version. Just a horrible experience overall. Whole VirtualBox hypervisor crashes regularly.

VMWare was the gold standard before, but so hopeless now.

I wish Parallels released something for Windows. Their Mac offerings are great.

Maybe I should try QEMU on the desktop as well.

Broadcom is one of those companies that gets you hooked and then sues you for a lot of money.

... So is Oracle, though.

It was crashy years ago as well. In the host kernel driver part, which is the worst place. And half of open source dev projects had Vagrant setups needing VirtualBox. Even though Docker has its problems, it's not half as bad.

In my recent experience Ubuntu is pretty buggy, I think the distro should also be part of the consideration.

Using Ubuntu on a daily machine for 6 months, after 15 years of Fedora, that's how I would describe my entire experience. Buggy.

No such issues with Kubuntu, so maybe is the GNOME ecosystem or maybe so unfortunate kernel+drivers, GPU combo.

I'm using KDE as well (after giving GNOME another shot for a week, which had even more issues), though I installed KDE in parallel, so there's always the chance that some GNOME residue is causing those issues.

What kind of issues ? is X or Wayland crashing and you are losing your work? I am still on X11 , in rare cases X crashes and is probably the video card/nvidia driver issues since all crashes happened when I had some 3d GPU stuff happening.

works on my machine

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