// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
GNOME Boxes Won't Look Ancient Anymore Thanks to a Glow-Up
The lone developer behind GNOME Boxes, Felipe Borges, has shown off a complete rewrite of the app as a Flatpak-only beta, featuring a modern interface foundation.
Balancing his day job at Red Hat and his usual GNOME Settings maintenance duties, Felipe says that he has been working on this by himself for the past two years, talking about his efforts at community events.
The first design call was going Flatpak-only. Boxes is a front end for libvirt and QEMU, so a lot of its behavior depends on what the host distro ships. Maintaining separate code paths for every distro isn't realistic for a single maintainer, so the new build bundles the entire virtualization stack itself instead of leaning on the host.
The second call is the one you will notice first. Boxes has moved to GTK4 and Libadwaita, dropping the old GTK3-based SPICE widget for a new display widget called Libmks. This is where the dated visual style finally goes away.
The third one was to fix Windows 11, where the rewritten Boxes can now successfully install it without requiring any manual workarounds or other kind of sorcery since it configures Secure Boot and a virtual TPM device on its own.
Moreover, a new VSOCK device gets around Flatpak sandboxing limits and lets you SSH straight into a guest, as long as it runs systemd v256 or newer. Early port forwarding support is also in, currently covering SSH and HTTP.
Notice the difference? Ignore the bars in the title bar on the right.
Everywhere you see in the revamped Boxes is the result of the new interface components. Despite that, the app felt familiar right from the first look. Being a regular Boxes user, I just knew where to click.
The new virtual machine (VM) creation flow backed that up beautifully. I began installing Windows 11, and Boxes just pre-filled the memory and storage values on its own and set UEFI as the preferred boot method without me touching anything.
The installation itself went through without a hitch, but Windows then insisted on a Microsoft account before letting me anywhere near the desktop, so that's where I had to stop.