KDE is finally getting a native virtual machine manager called “Karton”
23 comments
·May 18, 2025bdbenton5255
I use Arch and love KDE Plasma. It even has a blue light filter. Am never going back to Windows. KDE runs faster, looks nicer, does not have forced adware and telemetry. Great daily driver.
marcodiego
I tried KDE 1.0 two decades ago. Although it looked like a copy of windows ideas in some points, it already seemed better even at the time.
fishgoesblub
Nice, having a new alternative to virt-manager is great, especially a Qt one. Unfortunate it's using Kirigami and Qt Quick, I always felt the appearance and functionality is much worse compared to Qt Widgets.
heavyset_go
Plasma's shell is in Kirigami and Qt Quick, it couldn't be more consistent and integrated into the DE than that.
hxorr
Yeah, that must be why plasma has always felt so janky to me... Even just simple stuff like simple menu launcher or task manager I can always get into an unexpected state or weird inconsistent behaviour...
I like KDE apps though, usually end up using those together with something like lxqt or xfce
bobmcnamara
Unfortunate it's using Kirigami and Qt Quick, I always felt the appearance and functionality is much worse compared to Qt Widgets.
MegaDeKay
Indeed, an alternative to virt-manager would be more than welcome. "What, you want to search the XML for a text string? Why would you want to do that? Undo? That's crazy talk!"
I had hoped KDE was over the K-named thing, but I guess not. At least Karton is better than Kvirt-manager.
shmerl
I think Qt Quick is a pretty generic level, you can make a lot of different interfaces with it. Kirigami is more specific.
bandrami
What ever happened to aqemu? That was my favorite frontend but it seems to have been languishing for a decade.
Jotalea
Karton, sounds like "cartón" but with the traditional K added to the start of the names in KDE programs.
c0balt
It is also the German shorthand name for carton/cardboard.
grg0
There's also Bottles: https://usebottles.com/
shmerl
Nice!
I've been using virt-manager for a long time, but more KDE native solution is welcome.
Still waiting for virt-manager to add support for Vulkan rendering through libvirt.
Side note, not sure if it's specific to Kirigami, but a bunch of interfaces which use it have this excessive margin spacing feel to them.
Something like that happens with print-manager's configuration which is using Kirigami supposedly too.
hagbard_c
Karton, Dutch for 'cardboard'. Chosen because it is a tool to handle (virtual) boxes, maybe?
atomicnumber3
No need to contact the Dutch for this one - I assume it's just "carton" with the C replaced with K
hagbard_c
Ah, but the Dutch can get there without indirection which means they're faster than those label-swapping Anglo- and Francophones.
gerdesj
French is not Germanic. It's a Romance language, so closer to Spanish, Italian, Portuguese etc
English, German and Dutch are Germanic.
pkaye
I would have gone with a creative name like kvm.
sureglymop
Could be German as well.
gerdesj
English, Dutch and German are all ... Germanic.
English is the weird one, except for the others.
I hope they can come up with a solution integrated into KDE where you can have apps running on a VM but appearing as a native Kwin window... Would probably need a helper daemon running on guest OS.
I know a similar thing has been done before but would be great to have upstream support from a major DE