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KDE is finally getting a native virtual machine manager called “Karton”
- shmerl 1y agoNice! I've been using virt-manager for a long time, but more KDE native solution is welcome. Still waiting for virt-manager to add support for Vulkan rendering through libvirt. Side note, not sure if it's specific to Kirigami, but a bunch of interfaces which use it have this excessive margin spacing feel to them. Something like that happens with print-manager's configuration which is using Kirigami supposedly too.
- hagbard_c 1y agoKarton, Dutch for 'cardboard'. Chosen because it is a tool to handle (virtual) boxes, maybe?
- atomicnumber3 1y agoNo need to contact the Dutch for this one - I assume it's just "carton" with the C replaced with K
- hagbard_c 1y agoAh, but the Dutch can get there without indirection which means they're faster than those label-swapping Anglo- and Francophones.
- pkaye 1y agoI would have gone with a creative name like kvm.
- gerdesj 1y agoFrench is not Germanic. It's a Romance language, so closer to Spanish, Italian, Portuguese etc English, German and Dutch are Germanic.
- hagbard_c 1y agoIt is a curious fact that grasshoppers have their ears in their legs. Curious, interesting and as relevant to the discourse as the fact that French is a Romance language. Maybe you intended to respond elsewhere in this thread?
- sureglymop 1y agoCould be German as well.
- EasyMark 1y agoI assumed it was a mild allusion to VirtualBox, which I always call vbox
- fishgoesblub 1y agoNice, having a new alternative to virt-manager is great, especially a Qt one. Unfortunate it's using Kirigami and Qt Quick, I always felt the appearance and functionality is much worse compared to Qt Widgets.
- MegaDeKay 1y agoIndeed, an alternative to virt-manager would be more than welcome. "What, you want to search the XML for a text string? Why would you want to do that? Undo? That's crazy talk!" I had hoped KDE was over the K-named thing, but I guess not. At least Karton is better than Kvirt-manager.
- panzi 1y agoKarton is German for cardboard and is often used as short for Karton Schachtel (cardboard box), so I guess it's about boxing. A lot of the time the German word for something is similar to the English word just with a K instead of a C. And I think a lot of KDE developers are German. So that makes sense to me.
- shmerl 1y agoI think Qt Quick is a pretty generic level, you can make a lot of different interfaces with it. Kirigami is more specific.
- heavyset_go 1y agoPlasma's shell is in Kirigami and Qt Quick, it couldn't be more consistent and integrated into the DE than that.
- bobmcnamara 1y agoUnfortunate it's using Kirigami and Qt Quick, I always felt the appearance and functionality is much worse compared to Qt Widgets.
- hxorr 1y agoYeah, that must be why plasma has always felt so janky to me... Even just simple stuff like simple menu launcher or task manager I can always get into an unexpected state or weird inconsistent behaviour... I like KDE apps though, usually end up using those together with something like lxqt or xfce
- Jotalea 1y agoKarton, sounds like "cartón" but with the traditional K added to the start of the names in KDE programs.
- bandrami 1y agoWhat ever happened to aqemu? That was my favorite frontend but it seems to have been languishing for a decade.
- Evidlo 1y agoDeveloper ran a Kickstarter to fund new features a while back that didn't take off unfortunately.
- bdbenton5255 1y agoI use Arch and love KDE Plasma. It even has a blue light filter. Am never going back to Windows. KDE runs faster, looks nicer, does not have forced adware and telemetry. Great daily driver.
- marcodiego 1y agoI tried KDE 1.0 two decades ago. Although it looked like a copy of windows ideas in some points, it already seemed better even at the time.
- LeFantome 1y agoIt was better up until about version 3. Then KDE got worse and Windows got better. I think KDE is back in top again.
- Narishma 1y agoKDE 4 was the bad one, not 3.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y agoIn fact, it was so unpopular that it inspired a fork of KDE 3: https://www.trinitydesktop.org/ https://www.trinitydesktop.org/ (IMHO, later versions of KDE got good, but even today I understand the appeal of just sticking to the same thing)
- darkwater 1y agoAnd it still exists, by looking at the NEWS section! That's a long grudge to hold :)
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y agoI don't know that it's a grudge per se; people liked KDE 3, so they forked it and stayed on the working thing that they liked. Don't fix what isn't broken.
- hxorr 1y agoI hope they can come up with a solution integrated into KDE where you can have apps running on a VM but appearing as a native Kwin window... Would probably need a helper daemon running on guest OS. I know a similar thing has been done before but would be great to have upstream support from a major DE
- mhitza 1y agoNone of the current solutions support this. Only if you fallback to X11 forwarding, but then it's not going to be seamless because it requires setup on guests. Happy to be corrected if I'm wrong, this was my conclusion last year when researching again this space (since we're talking about virtualization support, thanks again RedHat for deprecating SPICE /s). I've read that it's possible in Windows' RDP, but haven't found a Linux client/server setup that supports that.
- pram 1y agoIIRC Parallels can/could do this (on a Mac anyway) but I can’t find the specific feature. You could like run Excel or something and it would be just the native Windows interface window, but on your MacOS desktop.
- adrianmsmith 1y agoParallels calls that "Coherence mode": https://kb.parallels.com/4670 https://kb.parallels.com/4670
- LiamPowell 1y ago> I've read that it's possible in Windows' RDP, but haven't found a Linux client/server setup that supports that. FreeRDP has supported this for over 10 years as a client. I don't know about non-windows servers: https://files.catbox.moe/roso8c.png https://files.catbox.moe/roso8c.png It's also significantly more responsive than any libvirt framebuffer.
- mhitza 1y ago
- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]
- vitorgrs 1y agoI really like KDE in general, and how full featured it is, but their design just feels dated compared to all modern OSes and other DMs on Linux... The only reason why I'm a gnome user, it's because of that. And yes, I know I can just customize, but everytime I try, it just make KDE more sluggish for some reason, and doesn't really feels natural.
- constantcrying 1y agoIn general my feeling on the KDE design is that heavily outshines Windows, which consistently delivers some of the worst design work I have ever seen on a desktop.
- IshKebab 1y agoI agree, but also if they don't add a stupid hamburger menu I'm switching back to KDE! Oh no I just checked and they also drank the kool-aid. Seems like you can turn it off at least.
- r0uv3n 1y agoHave you tried Plasma 6 yet? To me it feels way more modern than Gnome.
- vitorgrs 1y agoYes, I tried!
- ipdashc 1y agoIt's interesting to me that this is so common. I feel exactly the opposite way, as if KDE is the only one that feels modern and good-looking. Not saying you're wrong, just that it's interesting how much perspectives differ on design, I suppose.
- const_cast 1y agoI feel the same way and it's a little unnerving how often people think KDE looks old meanwhile gnome or even Windows look... good. Like, are we looking at the same thing? Having as much whitespace as possible and icons over text does not a modern application make.
- dengolius 1y agoDo we really need another GUI for kvm/qemu? I thought https://cockpit-project.org https://cockpit-project.org cover the idea to develop something like Karton, but who am I to think so =)
- qalmakka 1y agoWeb interfaces are fine for advanced users, but they suck for "standard" users. VMs are hard enough to understand for your average user; the more your UI looks like VirtualBox or VMWare the better
- EasyMark 1y agoI always welcome competition but virt-manager has been good enough for me for a while now.
- brokegrammer 1y agoWhat KDE needs isn't new features but less bugs.
- jopicornell 1y agoThat's something I think as well. I've tried 4 times through the years, and KDE always felt less stable and solid than Gnome. I guess it's the configurability of KDE that makes it that way. I like the concept, but I guess maintaining it is no easy task, and people is more motivated to add things than fix them.
- DocTomoe 1y agoKDE lost me when they moved from the relatively stable (and - let's face it - pretty Windows 9x-style) KDE 3.5 to KDE 4. It was promised as a quantum leap, but Plasma came over as unstable, unfinished, and lacking a lot of the functionality I came to love with the 3.5 stack. In the end, I gave up, went to window managers instead to full DEs, then to i3, and now am on a Mac. Still, I remember 3.5 fondly. The last good Linux Desktop Environment (Gnome tried so hard, but always was a bit too 'our way or the highway' when KDE allowed for some customization)
- jraph 1y agoEarly versions of KDE 4.0 were terrible, and it lasted for a couple of years, but I've found later versions quite solid. Early versions of KDE 5 were relatively stable but were lacking features. I find late 5.X versions and all 6.X version quite robust. There are still bugs but they do seem to be ironing them out, they go in the right direction. The only big bugs I notice these days are the occasionnal plasmashell crashes but it comes back on its own. KWin doesn't crash and that's fortunate because on Wayland, that would bring down non KDE apps. I exclusively use plasma, I'm quite sensitive to instabilities, it's not an issue for me with KDE. I did avoid the first years of KDE 4 and was using GNOME at that time. Have you tried Trinity?
- usrnm 1y agoKDE 3 to KDE 4 transition really was painful, it pushed me away as well, but it also happened over 15 years ago. I gave it a shot a few years back, and it was great, much better than modern-day Gnome in my opinion.
- Aardwolf 1y agoWhy "finally"? To me, KDE's job should be to organize and render windows, application launcher icons, and the like If I want a virtual machine, I'll use a virtual machine for that All this "KDE suite" stuff and what not is unnecesarry - some of these are good pieces of software that I like to use, but there's no reason they need any integration with a desktop environment (arguably a few basics like a file manager, VTE and plain text editor are expected and fine but in theory also can be wholly separate) Also, any integration attempts like making the icons a common asset rather than each application have their own, _fail_ and make things worse, with these integrations applications less often have working icons at all, and more often have mistakes like black icons against a black background making them invisible
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- justaj 1y agoThis. I tried Neon Stable a while ago and it felt like the developers were already spread thin across the KDE ecosystem. I think more projects like this (while not otherwise intended) will only exacerbate these issues.
- c-hendricks 1y agoFor some reason I doubt this summer of code project by a university student will take meaningful development resources from the rest of KDE.
- p4bl0 1y ago> To me, KDE's job should be to organize and render windows, application launcher icons, and the like I believe you are confusing Plasma, which is KDE's desktop environment, and the KDE Project, which also hosts a lot of applications that can be used with or without Plasma, many of which are multiplatforms. Even on Windows one can use a lot of KDE apps without using their desktop environment, Plasma. It's also totally possible to use Plasma without any of the KDE apps, not even the file manager (Dolphin), the VTE (Konsole), or the simple text editor (Kwrite). Historically, the desktop environment was KDE (Kool Desktop Environment), but it's been quite a long time since the DE is one among many software that the KDE project works on. That said, I 100% agree with you on icons, and never used an icon theme :).
- sph 1y agoI love how 95% of the comments are about anything but the effing article. Looking forward to a new VM manager. virt-manager is what I use and it's not very maintained: it still has issues on a HiDPI screen where scaling is all messed up. GNOME Boxes is both buggy and featureless in the usual GNOME sense, haven't found much use for it. I think all the focus has been on the virsh CLI and we haven't had a decent VM GUI in a while.
- Vilian 1y agoThe thing is that Gnome Boxes is user a lot and it's still buggy, the KDE one is going to be less used, it would really manage to be less buggy?, let's wait and see I guess
- moqmar 1y agoThe main problem is the bugginess in combination with the featurelessness. Usually you can work around bugs in some way or another, but many of the bugs in Boxes seem to come from the fact that control is taken away from the user in the first place, and there's no way around it except touching the source code.
- nixosbestos 1y agoAh yes, I'm so desensitized to the utter terrible quality of the virt* stack that I forgot that they merged "hidpi support" that was categorically worse than it being unscaled, and then just said "fuck it" for like a decade. It's stunning that apparently not a single dev working on it has ever owned a hidpi screen apparently.
- pipallweek 1y agoKarton is a welcome development—there’s definitely a gap in the Linux desktop space for a VM manager that feels native, lightweight, and user-friendly without sacrificing features. virt-manager is still functional but hasn’t kept pace with modern UX expectations, and GNOME Boxes has taken the opposite route: sleek but lacking power-user features. KDE’s approach could strike a balance, especially if they leverage Qt's flexibility and KDE’s existing system integration. I’m cautiously optimistic—if Karton stays focused and avoids becoming bloated, it could fill a long-standing need for developers and desktop users alike. The key will be how well it handles real-world edge cases (HiDPI, GPU passthrough, multi-VM workflows, etc.).
- LargoLasskhyfv 1y agoRappelkiste bzw. "Es rappelt in der Kiste!" :-)