Most KDE users currently rely on GTK-based virtual machine managers such as virt-manager or GNOME Boxes to manage their KVM instances.
Of course, this is fine except for one big disadvantage—these applications aren’t fully integrated into the Plasma ecosystem, often resulting in not-so-good user experiences. But that looks set to change soon.
Something exciting is looming on the horizon—a promising new project called Karton, which aims to provide a seamless virtual machine management experience tightly integrated into KDE’s Plasma desktop environment.
Initially envisioned as a QEMU frontend, it is now being reimagined as a modern Qt-Quick/Kirigami-based interface leveraging libvirt as its backend.
This integration promises to effectively abstract low-level virtualization tasks, potentially enabling cross-platform compatibility. As it stands, Karton can already display existing virtual machines, start and stop them, and manage basic installation and deletion processes.
At the recent Plasma Sprint in Graz, Derek Lin, the main app’s developer, advanced Karton’s capabilities significantly by developing a custom domain installer.
Utilizing the libosinfo API, this new feature can intelligently parse OS installer disk images and generate tailored XML configurations, simplifying further development and future feature additions.
Additionally, the devs recently began work on a custom Qt-Quick virtual machine viewer. This new feature utilizes the spice-client-glib library to connect and render frames directly onto a QQuickItem. Though promising, it is currently in an early, experimental state and has not yet incorporated user input functionality.
However, despite these promising developments, keep in mind that Karton is in the very early stages of development and, according to Lin, may still cause instability with existing virtual machines. Thus, it is advisable to avoid using Karton to manage critical virtual machines at this stage.
Changes planned for integration this summer include refining the virtual machine viewer, adding snapshot capabilities, reworking the user interface for better usability, and integrating monitoring features similar to those found in virt-manager.
KDE enthusiasts and virtualization users with feature requests or suggestions can connect with the development team via their Matrix channel at karton:kde.org.
You can learn more about Karton virtual machine manager here—early testers can grab the source code from the app’s Git repository and build it themselves.
Cool 😀.
Kool 😉