Comment by greenavocado
1 day ago
If you need Windows these days just install virt-manager and load the version of Windows you need.
It's really fast and lightweight (my laptop stays cold at idle while running the Windows VMs) with all the HV enlightenments for good computational efficiency.
Installing and using the virtio drivers is key for many useful features such as memory ballooning, fast networking with low computational overhead, and virtiofs which is used to mount a virtual drive in the Windows guest in a way that it's not a "network" drive.
How does this work compared to VirtualBox?
KVM/QEMU is the only logical and sane choice on Linux, unless some tooling you're using requires VirtualBox. The key is to optimize and tweak all your host and guest settings, installing the guest tools too. Once you have it optimized it purrs.
Been using VB twenty years and mostly happy, but ready to try something new.
Seems to be just as fast or faster and doesn't require proprietary software.