I wouldn't have thought virtualisation software was needed by default. What I would call power users that need virtualisation software are likely quite comfortable opening Discover or Konsole to install their preferred solution.

I wouldn't have thought virtualisation software was needed by default. What I would call power users that need virtualisation software are likely quite comfortable opening Discover or Konsole to install their preferred solution.

The problem with GNOME Software and Plasma Discover is that they're actually terrible for discovering solutions to particular problems. In particular, they don't really provide guidance on preferred solutions or anything of that nature. And as we currently lack a mechanism to guide people to applications that are not installed, the method we have to guide people is to preload a reasonable collection of high quality software.

Additionally, virtualization is not a "power user" feature for the contemporary Linux user. It is unfortunately a common requirement for interfacing with applications and services that require Windows, for example. It is also helpful to have a good path for developer-friendly workflows that require using foreign operating systems.

Note that Fedora Workstation does preload GNOME Boxes and it is regularly considered a highlight of the Workstation experience. In many respects, I wish for our spin to be equivalent to the Workstation Edition, just using KDE Plasma instead of GNOME. I would certainly prefer to have a KDE+Qt based solution that works like Boxes, but nobody has desired to develop one, so here we are.

I'm not against this in principle, but I do have a question of size.
There has already been many questions and comments about the size of the KDE Spin.
How much size does this add?

On my system, it added 50MiB. I can check from a fresh install, but I don't expect it to be much more than that.

Just tried gnome-boxes, wasn't impressed. Probably good if you want a quick, simple, virtual machine. It is too restrictive for me.
I prefer virt-manager, because it gives me much more flexibility.

But, beyond my personal opinioin, we do not have any of the virt packages in the KDE Spin.
Thus, adding gnome-boxes or virt-manager add significant space. From a freshly installed F36 KDE Spin install, I get the following.

dnf install gnome-boxes

Install 128 Packages
Total download size: 47 M
Installed size: 185 M

dnf install virt-manager

Install 131 Packages
Total download size: 49 M
Installed size: 193 M

I'm not against this in principle, but I do have a question of size.
There has already been many questions and comments about the size of the KDE Spin.
How much size does this add?

We could make this up by removing some of the "bloat" applications that people generally don't like such as the Akonadi suite (Kontact, Kmail, Korganizer etc), dnfdragora, Qt d-bus viewer etc...

+1 to add "Gnome-boxes" application, based on the conversation we had in kde-sig meeting, It is gonna be also trying to look as "Qt" as possible so I'm positive to see that application until we have proper Qt/Kde based on solution.

+1 as I use GNOME Boxes quite often even though it's not a Qt app.

No opinion. We can include the GNOME Boxes Flatpak on Kinoite easily :).

@feborges and I talked about this and he's also committed to assisting to make sure GNOME Boxes looks and works well on KDE Plasma, so I will probably set aside some time to go through all major functions and do a UI review on it with the Breeze stylesheet so he can do any needed tweaks there to look good on KDE Plasma.

I vote no but I'm also interested (as I know others are) in a minimal Fedora KDE ISO.

A minimal ISO is not in the cards for a couple of reasons:

• "Minimal" is different to everyone, and whatever line we draw will make someone unhappy.
• It adds too much complexity for releases, and I'd rather not stretch Fedora QA more.

Minimal installs are always possible using the netinstall ISO if a user wants that, though.

I've spun one for myself just for my own use just because I was curious.
Do all ISOs have to be sent through Fedora QA?

On 31/1/23 17:01, Neal Gompa wrote:

ngompa added a new comment to an issue you are following:
``
A minimal ISO is not in the cards for a couple of reasons:

• "Minimal" is different to everyone, and whatever line we draw will make someone unhappy.
• It adds too much complexity for releases, and I'd rather not stretch Fedora QA more.

Minimal installs are always possible using the netinstall ISO if a user wants that, though.
``

To reply, visit the link below or just reply to this email
https://pagure.io/fedora-kde/SIG/issue/207

Sort of. Because KDE Plasma is release-blocking, we have to specifically indicate which ones don't need to be tested (like we did for Kinoite), but adding a variant also adds to the compose process (which is not fast and complex) that runs every day. It's also a burden for us because we have to deal with two different KDE Plasma experiences that can result in different bugs.

We already have enough problems as it is, I'd rather not add a "minimal" spin to the mix.

I oppose that. I tried Gnome-Boxes first too, because I wanted something simple, but virt-manager actually is more intuitive. Maybe this "create a machine" and "open connection" is a bit confusing, but in the end its a few clicks, no advanced menus by default, and nice directly accessible things like mounting devices, shutting it down e.g.

I prefer virt-manager a lot now, especially if users need to emulate Windows.

Comment: This discussion also has two sides. On Fedora KDE it makes no sense to me to preinstall that software (I would keep it as small as possible). On Kinoite it is better to have too much than too little, because layering software eats resources.

I could imagine a solution just being to include qemu qemu-kvm and let users choose their GUI frontend to layer.

Looking through this thread, I'm not really seeing consensus...

Going by the current active members of kde sig, I have:
+1: ngompa, jgrulich
0: siosm
-1: tdawson (?)

@farchord @yselkowitz @marcdeop @aleasto
Did any of you have opinions on this?

Let's put a pause on this for a bit. In the past couple of years, things have changed a bit.

There's a work-in-progress rewrite of GNOME Boxes by @feborges to use GTK4+libadwaita: https://gitlab.gnome.org/felipeborges/boxes

Not quite stoked about that. There's also some other developments by @arraybolt3 that could stand in place of this and we could ship instead.

FYI I have been working on getting virt apps buildable for flatpaks, but it's been slow going. I'm just a few minor changes away from being able to make virt-viewer and virt-manager flatpaks, but those would rely on qemu-kvm and libvirt-daemon-* on the host, so they would need to be in the spins for them to "just work" (if they aren't already). Presumably, qt-virt-manager and qt-remote-viewer would be similarly doable, except that they seem unmaintained. A Boxes flatpak would be self-contained, but will require a lot more changes to build, and even now it looks very much like a GNOME app.

I think virt-manager is pretty easy to use, and has way more options under the hood. It may not be as straight forward, but we can fix this with documentation.

But... virt-manager also uses GTK, right?

I also use a mix of GNOME apps, and prefer many over KDE apps.

Celluloid > Haruna (buggy)
SimpleScan > Skanpage (cropping)
Snapshot > Kamoso (multiple cameras)
Lollypop/Gapless > Elisa/Juk

Warp, Decoder, Authenticator, VideoTrimmer are often unique, very well packaged as Flatpaks and have no alternative. Video editing is really complex, VideoTrimmer makes this easy.

I find this discussion really interesting. GNOME apps work very fine on KDE, they have all decorations, adapt the light/dark theme. This cant be said the other way around poorly.

I wouldn't have thought virtualisation software was needed by default. What I would call power users that need virtualisation software are likely quite comfortable opening Discover or Konsole to install their preferred solution.

The problem with GNOME Software and Plasma Discover is that they're actually terrible for discovering solutions to particular problems. In particular, they don't really provide guidance on preferred solutions or anything of that nature. And as we currently lack a mechanism to guide people to applications that are not installed, the method we have to guide people is to preload a reasonable collection of high quality software.

Additionally, virtualization is not a "power user" feature for the contemporary Linux user. It is unfortunately a common requirement for interfacing with applications and services that require Windows, for example. It is also helpful to have a good path for developer-friendly workflows that require using foreign operating systems.

Note that Fedora Workstation does preload GNOME Boxes and it is regularly considered a highlight of the Workstation experience. In many respects, I wish for our spin to be equivalent to the Workstation Edition, just using KDE Plasma instead of GNOME. I would certainly prefer to have a KDE+Qt based solution that works like Boxes, but nobody has desired to develop one, so here we are.

Couldnt a link to the virt-manager or GNOME boxes docs be integrated in the appstream metadata shown in Discover? And Discover could get a virtualization category or sub-category.

I think virt-manager is pretty easy to use, and has way more options under the hood. It may not be as straight forward, but we can fix this with documentation.

But... virt-manager also uses GTK, right?

I also use a mix of GNOME apps, and prefer many over KDE apps.

Celluloid > Haruna (buggy)
SimpleScan > Skanpage (cropping)
Snapshot > Kamoso (multiple cameras)
Lollypop/Gapless > Elisa/Juk

Warp, Decoder, Authenticator, VideoTrimmer are often unique, very well packaged as Flatpaks and have no alternative. Video editing is really complex, VideoTrimmer makes this easy.

I find this discussion really interesting. GNOME apps work very fine on KDE, they have all decorations, adapt the light/dark theme. This cant be said the other way around poorly.

Let's try to keep this discussion limited to the virtualization software so that things don't get too broad in scope.

With the amount of apps in the KDE stack, I'm surprised there isn't one yet about virtualization to be honest.

I don't know about shipping gnome boxes in the KDE spin. That would make our big image much bigger.

I wish we could add a checkbox on the install to add virtua.....

Wait, what about adding something similar to plasma-welcome-fedora, either on the same page as "Enable third party tools" or on another page? That would simply add the virtualization group (Or whatever @ngompa feels is appropriate)?

I wish we could add a checkbox on the install to add virtua.....

Wait, what about adding something similar to plasma-welcome-fedora, either on the same page as "Enable third party tools" or on another page? That would simply add the virtualization group (Or whatever @ngompa feels is appropriate)?

This would be a bad idea, as then it will spiral into "let's shove everything into the welcome app". One of the major goals of Fedora KDE deliverables is to deliver curated experiences that showcase KDE technology. Sure, we can't stuff all the cool stuff, but we can be thoughtful about what we include so that we can show that the KDE ecosystem is fleshed out in its own right.

I think my comment was relevant, as we are talking about preinstalling GTK apps.

I see the issue less with GTK apps (as they work just as well as on GNOME) and more with bloating the ISO even more.

The example was where I see GTK apps as actually better in function than already preinstalled (!) KDE apps. But we dont need to discuss specific apps here.

I think we should find a better way of advertising apps or app bundles. Appstream links work fine in Discover, like on apps.kde.org.

We could do a "Recommended Software" website where buttons allow users to find software they may want but dont know. It could be interactive or just have multiple buttons, for example deciding for Boxes vs. virt-manager depending on wanted complexity.

@ngompa I agree that the welcome dialog should be short. Adding a single link to such a website could help though.

ALSO: the Firefox bookmarks need some love. They are partly outdated or missing, and this is a common and very well integrated (as in: not shown once) method to guide users.

I was not able to find them, anyone know where they are?

Karton is also being worked on by a KDE user. It's still very early stages though.

@boredsquirrel Please stop conflating several topics into an unrelated issue. This issue about GNOME Boxes. All other topics should be discussed elsewhere, in the forum on in other issues, one topic per issue.

I just realized how old this issue is :D

Without wanting to continue this discussion @siosm, my point was: Fedora KDE already has a ton of apps preinstalled, which many users find suboptimal. There are many GTK apps that would offer more functionality than preinstalled apps. The argument can be made that GTK is not the issue, but features, where some apps may be better. A counterargument would be, that Fedora KDE does not need more preinstalled apps, and that a different method of bringing these apps to users could be found.

We could do a "Recommended Software" website where buttons allow users to find software they may want but dont know. It could be interactive or just have multiple buttons, for example deciding for Boxes vs. virt-manager depending on wanted complexity.

@ngompa I agree that the welcome dialog should be short. Adding a single link to such a website could help though.

This is a good idea, we can patch the Home page of Discover app, add a "Fedora's recommendations" section, then the welcome app only link to the Discover app.

Pre-install apps or not won't matter considering how quickly the pre-installed version become outdated, user would have to wait for update to happen anyway.

FWIW there is currently a virt-manager flatpak which works with the host system session or remote sessions, and I now have a local proof-of-concept build that has a working user session option along with a build of gnome-boxes. This requires extensive packaging modifications to both qemu and libvirt, so it will take some work to clean-up, submit, and get my patches merged, but it should be doable.

Thanks Yaakov. I've also started the work to push virt-manager to Flathub: https://github.com/flathub/flathub/pull/5882