I use Bazzite for Gaming + Work on a fixed PC, but Aurora for Work only on a laptop.
I expected to find the same stability on Aurora and the same functionality (Gaming excepted) but I couldn’t figure out how to set up virtualization as easily on Aurora as on Bazzite.
In Bazzite, there’s the ujust setup-virtualization command.
This command is absent from Aurora.
I’ve tried to find the script manually in “/usr/share/ublue-os/just” on my Bazzite machine and run the commands manually on Aurora, but there are errors, even though on the whole it works.
But my Windows VMs, which run perfectly on Bazzite, aren’t as perfectly integrated into Aurora, even though the “spice” components are installed identically on the Windows VMs, since they’re copies. What doesn’t work well is the automatic resolution of the VM screen.
Would it be possible to natively implement virtualization support in Aurora and all the necessary components? Bazzite seems to have a head start on this.
Check out ‘ujust dx-group’ - Bazzite comes with stock baseline and ‘dx’ is the “Developer Experience” where tools such as Virtualization, Docker, etc are offered as add-ons. I actually think Virtualization is already present/included into the stock install.
Note, Libvirt is the virtualization backend used for both GNOME Boxes, Virtual Machines plugin for Cockpit and Virtual Machine Manager (virt-manager).
You can also opt-in to switch to the Bluefin-DX with ‘ujust devmode’.
I’m not aware if this is available for Aurora (I faintly remember seeing it as W.I.P. somewhere), however.
Also, be careful - I mentioned “you can switch to Bluefin-DX” out of habit because I use Bluefin and Bazzite myself, but as pointed out: Rebasing on Bazzite … you shouldn’t do that between different Desktop Environments (Note, there’s a rebase helper util in ujust). Figured I’d point this out so you don’t end up in the weeds because I gave bad advice.
Use the Aurora-dx image. It has all of the virtualization packages that the ujust command installs on Bazzite. Make sure to run the ujust dx-group after rebasing to Aurora-dx so that you are in the correct groups. You can use ujust devmode to switch to Aurora-dx.
I reinstalled Aurora-DX, and ran the “ujust dx-group” command. I added the following packages: “gnome-boxes libguestfs python3-libguestfs virt-top”.
Then I copied my qcow2 files from my VMs into Aurora and used gnome-boxes to launch them as I do on Bazzite.
It works better, but I still have the resolution that doesn’t automatically adapt to the whole available space in the gnome-boxes window. I have to choose a resolution manually in the Windows VM and then it does some sort of scaling to fit the window space. It’s not the window space that automatically defines the VM resolution.
I don’t understand why the two behave so differently.
At worst, I’d switch my laptop to Bazzite too, but I wish it hadn’t come to that.