Weird setup: Proxmox VE on laptop with KDE Plasma desktop and windows from guests connected using Waypipe (GUI programs can seamlessly run in their own VMs)
I haven't ran this for a few months, so I may not remember everything I had to set up.
Anyway, it's just regular install of Proxmox that I then installed KDE Plasma on top of (same as with plain Debian).
I had to remove WiFi interface from /etc/network/interfaces for it to work as expected.
I also set up NAT for guests (10.0.0.0/24) (lower middle in screenshot).
To guests I added vhost-vsock-pci to make Vsock work (used for Waypipe), and VirtIO sound card to make audio work through host. (Under args: in middle of screenshot). You can see audio show up in Applications tab of sound menu (bottom right), currently playing music from Debian's Firefox Window (top, slightly left).
Waypipe is set up to automatically listen on host using KDE's Autostart menu (bottom, center). Applications are launched using desktop shortcuts which send a command to guests over SSH (middle, slightly left).
One thing you may notice is app icons not working (Wayland icon is shown instead). I don't know why, it only works for LibreOffice. But that's just cosmetic.
End result is that aside from guests not having HW acceleration for thing like video playback, things just work like with normally installed programs. Double-click an icon, and it launches.
I haven't set up anything nicer for storage. SSH is sub-optimal due to useless encryption, but for the occasional 5MiB file this doesn't matter.
One thing I am not sure how to do "properly" is Waydroid. I tried to set it up in unprivileged Arch LXC, that did not work. I could just put it directly onto host, but that feels wrong. And inside a VM I can't use GPU acceleration, which even on a more powerful machine was a quite painful experience.
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I am a big fan of doing this kind of thing with promox! I run labwc and pipewire into apps!
Because I wanted the smoothest possible graphics while remoting into my VMs, I went full into lightweight/minimal wayland, which was frustrating at first but it's worth it.
I run it on my lenovo laptop as my mobile development machine and works great!
Even better for graphical smoothness, I discovered that my laptop supports GPU SR-IOV, which took some effort, but now my VMs can benefit from GPU pass through without losing my host display! I am most pleased with this more than any other customization I've done to my dev box.
The craziest thing is that I get more battery life RDP'ing into windows 11 on my local proxmox VM than I did when I ran it on the bare metal. Like 8-10 hours instead of 6-8 doing the same dev tasks.
Anyway, I am glad to meet a kindred spirit! Be well.
Sounds like you've reinvented qubes.
https://www.qubes-os.org/
I wish there was a QEMU/KVM version of qubes. I feel like it would have better performance since a lot of virtualization work is done there (like virtio, virgl, etc). And also probably a lot more hackable
I hate this
I love this
The same but with automatic hardware passthrough is easy with distrobox and distrobox-export. Or is it not the same?
idk enough about this to have an informed opinion on it, but I know enough about this to hate it.
Noice setup. I've run Arch as a VM in proxmox for years now on my big pc. I also run HassOS, FreeNAS, and winblows10, but Arch gets the GPU. Nvidia ( I like Cuda) prevents you from sharing across VMs but with docker it's easy. I just run docker on Arch for that. *You have to run Proxmox headless for this setup to work.
What you are describing is called virtio
Technically you don't need to go full headless if you have multiple graphics devices and or USB controllers
Very cool. I like to run things in VMs nowadays, just like Qubes, except I wanted QEMU/KVM so I just use virt-manager.