Boxes – view, access, and manage remote and virtual systems

Last Updated on April 6, 2025

Boxes is a simple GNOME application to view, access, and manage remote and virtual systems.

Boxes is targeted towards a typical desktop end-user who wants either a very safe and easy way to try out new operating systems or new (potentially unstable) versions of her/his favorite operating system(s), or needs to connect to a remote machine (home-office connection being a typical use-case). For this reason, Boxes does not provide many of the advanced options to tweak virtual machines provided by virt-manager. Instead, Boxes focuses on getting things working out of the box with very little input from user.

This is free and open source software.

Features include:

• Select an operating system and let Boxes download and install it for you in a virtual machine.
• Download freely available operating systems.
• Automatically install CentOS Stream, Debian, Fedora, Microsoft Windows, OpenSUSE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Ubuntu.
• Create virtual machines from operating system images with a couple of clicks.
• Limit the resources (memory and storage) your virtual machines consume from your system.
• Take snapshots of virtual machines to restore to previous states.
• Redirect USB devices from your physical machine into virtual machines.
• 3D acceleration for some of the supported operating systems.
• Automatically resize virtual machines displays to the window size.
• Share clipboard between your system and virtual machines.
• Share files to virtual machines by dropping them from your file manager into the Boxes window.
• Setup Shared Folders between your system and virtual machines.

Website: apps.gnome.org/Boxes
Support: GitLab Code Repository
Developer: Felipe Borges
License: GNU General Public License v2.0

Boxes is written in Vala. Learn Vala with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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