Now KDE Users Will Get Easy Virtual Machine Management, Too

If you work with virtual machines, perhaps to spin up a clean OS install for testing, historically you have either bitten the bullet and used one of the commercial options, …read more

May 22, 2025 - 21:20

Now KDE Users Will Get Easy Virtual Machine Management, Too

If you work with virtual machines, perhaps to spin up a clean OS install for testing, historically you have either bitten the bullet and used one of the commercial options, or spent time getting your hands dirty with something open source. Over recent years that has changed, with the arrival of open source graphical applications for effortless VM usage. We’ve used GNOME Boxes here to make our lives a lot easier. Now KDE are also joining the party with Karton, a project which will deliver what looks very similar to Boxes in the KDE desktop.

The news comes in a post from Derek Lin, and shows us what work has already been done as well as a roadmap for future work. At the moment it’s in no way production ready and it only works with QEMU, but it can generate new VMs, run them, and capture their screens to a desktop window. Having no wish to join in any Linux desktop holy wars we look forward to seeing this piece of software progress, as it’s a Google Summer Of Code project we hope there will be plenty more to see shortly.

Still using the commercial option? You can move to open source too!