A few quality of life updates for desktop VMs

[stuffbucket]

Hello all,

I have a few small quality of life suggestions/ideas (with PRs / solutions) that I want to share with the team. I've been using lima for headless VMs for quite awhile, and recently started using UTM on my Mac. I hadn't noticed the video option on lima so spent some time trying to understand how to bring a GUI in for desktop VMs using Lima. Better late than never to find it while reviewing my branches in prep for a few PRs. Regardless, I'd still like to offer a few contributions / ideas if any of these resonate with others:

1. On macOS, the code-hex/vz drivers always put scrollbars on the desktop GUI. This has the effect of cutting off ~16px from the desktop area itself as they appear over the top of the desktop GUI from the VM. I have a small Objective-C runtime swizzle that turns those scrollbars off. I'm happy to submit to upstream for code-hex/vz as well, but in the meantime the GUI on macOS (at least for me) is very annoying to use.

2. For QEMU, I have a second PR that adds support for full audio routing with SPICE and support for input (microphone).

3. For VZ, I have a third PR that adds clipboard support, as well as video sizing options in the template (rather than the default 1920x1080). Setting the default video size is very handy when you are going to be taking a lot of screenshots. Clipboard support is very helpful on vz. Without it, I would end up having to set up SPICE, etc.

4. Last PR updates the experimental templates that are relevant to the above and adds a few for things like debian 13 w/ plasma desktop.

I am trying to get more people to use lima, and they'll need desktop support to be able to do that. The above are small but helpful additions. I'm sure the core team is chasing much harder problems to solve.

What do people think?

Thanks!

[afbjorklund]

Adding SPICE graphics and improving the built-in VZ graphics sounds like good additions, thank you for that.

The more advanced examples should probably not be included in Lima, but would be nice to link to (somewhere)

Had some similar thoughts before

• Providing graphical lima example #1002

[stuffbucket]

I was thinking the same thing about the examples. Given that this is a foundation project it could be tricky to include useful examples that are entirely unopinionated. I don't mind hosting some of the more complex examples.

I hadn't seen the work that was done earlier until I was cleaning things up to try to submit a PR. If you have thoughts on examples you'd like to see or would like to have included please let me know. I'm by no means a desktop Linux distro guru. Thank you for the earlier thinking, it was helpful to me as I was getting things pulled together.

[stuffbucket]

Happy New Year everyone.

I've been plugging away at trying to address all the great feedback you've been giving me. I updated the comments to the swizzle PR and focued on making improvements to Code-Hex/vz first. I'll outline them here just so it's clearer what direction I am trying to go in for Lima.

In the Lima swizzle PR I was subbing in a new UI to override the default one that Code-Hex/vz had provided. In the issue that I opened in Code-Hex/vz (references below) I've essentially made the swizzle a first class API that optionally allows callers to substitute in their own UX. This had the nice effect of making it easy to support multiple concurrent VM/GUI windows from one application instance, so I demonstrated both in the gui-linux example.

Lima "Swizzle PR": swizzle PR
Code-Hex/vz issue: Code-Hex/vz/issues/210
Working implementation: stuffbucket/[email protected]

@afbjorklund, I will go back and work on the spice PR comments as well, but the holidays slowed me down a bit the past two weeks.

Thanks.