gnome boxes has a variety of advantages over the traditional userspace tools that are available on the Linux platforms. Firstly, gnome boxes is a desktop environment, so it is a desktop virtual machine. Secondly, gnome boxes has the powerful and efficient Compiz Fusion plugin, which allows users to drag and drop various widgets that are part of a website. gnome boxes allows the user to not only manage multiple sites, but also to be able to have multiple open documents at the same time, in multiple workspaces. gnome boxes offers a more robust solution for the web development community, because it provides the necessary tools to have a fully featured website, while taking up very little system resources.
gnome boxes is a program of the gnome desktop environment, utilising the popular QEMU, KVM and libvirt virtual machines to allow access to virtual machines. The idea behind this design is to allow the user to have complete control over the machines, giving them total control over the hardware and software, making it possible for people to have fully functional operating systems without having to buy, compile, maintain or support them. It is a much more cost effective solution than building a physical machine that requires extensive technical skills, as these machines can be managed and maintained by any person with a basic knowledge of computers.
The gnome boxes interface looks very similar to the graphical user interface (GUI) of the windows environment, however they differ in a number of different areas. gnome boxes does not use the standard xterm commands and functions, as it implements a completely different virtual machine. The Gnome OS virtual machine consists of two different programs, gnome-builder and gnome-box, which are then used by the gnome command-line utility. The key difference that sets this apart from other virtualisation software is the use of the entire X Window server to run the virtual machines.
As a result, the actual desktop environment on these machines is completely different to most other form of desktop virtualisation. For example, gnome-boxes only have one dedicated session, meaning that all other sessions are not automatically mapped to a specific location on the computer. gnome-builder also uses a different graphical interface, where gnome-builder asks the user for configuration information before it begins booting up. gnome-builder will then ask the user to map their keyboard and mouse to specific locations on the screen, which are then used to create local virtual machines. gnome-box is different because it does not use any X server for its virtualisation, which means that it maps the keyboard and mouse to the current location on the computer.
As you can see, both gnome boxes and gnome-builder are completely different from the virtualisation software that many users are used to. Although they are quite different, both provide the essential function of virtualisation. The main difference between the two is that gnome-boxes rely more on the ability of the user to reconfigure the operating system while gnome-builder relies solely on the X server for the provisioning of the VDI virtual machine. gnome-builder may be able to configure a greater number of computers than gnome-boxes, but both are highly useful in that they allow you to quickly and easily virtualise your computing infrastructure, whether it consists of one computer or an entire server.
To conclude, gnome boxes and gnome-builder are both excellent forms of virtualisation technology for the desktop. gnome-boxes provide the essential functionality necessary for running a specific set of applications on a specific computer, while gnome-builder enables the user to quickly and easily configure and use multiple virtual machines. Both provide a highly usable solution for running multiple different operating systems on the same hardware. gnome-boxes however, provides a slightly more extensive set of features, as they require the user to manually enter the information required by the X server. gnome-builder, on the other hand, automatically enters these details for you, making it considerably easier to configure and use virtual machines.