KDE is finally getting a native virtual machine manager called "Karton"

Summary

If you spend most of your time in GNOME, you've probably used something like GNOME Boxes to spin up virtual machines without much hassle. We actually gave it a shoutout in our list of essential Linux apps for newcomers this year. KDE users, however, have often found themselves relying on tools such as virt-manager or even GNOME Boxes itself. While functional, these don't always feel perfectly at home within the Plasma desktop, and the old qt-virt-manager, a Qt-based alternative, has seen its development stall for years. Now, a new Virtual Machine Manager is in the works for KDE Plasma. The project, named Karton, has roots dating back to Aaron Rainbolt's original effort to build a QEMU frontend using its command line interface. Later, KDE developer Harald Sitter took over and developed it as a Google Summer of Code project. Currently, Karton is actively developed by Derek Lin, a University of Waterloo student participating in Google Summer of Code 2025. His primary aim is to deliver a virtual machine manager that truly belongs in the KDE ecosystem. To feel right at home in KDE, Karton is being built with Qt Quick and Kirigami. It uses the libvirt API to handle virtual machines and could eventually work across different platforms. Right now, development is focused on getting the core parts in place. Lin is working on a new domain installer that ditches direct virt-install calls in favor of libosinfo, which helps detect OS images and generate the right libvirt XML for setting up virtual machines more precisely. He's still refining device configuration and working on broader hypervisor support. Another key part of the work is building a custom SPICE viewer using Qt Quick from scratch: If you're curious, here's the list of specific deliverables Lin included in his GSoC proposal, though he notes the proposal itself is a bit outdated: Install and configure virtual machines through libvirt’s XML format instead of virt-install CLI Implement a custom SPICE viewer to allow use...