I'm prepping for a cpu swap (thanks to a recent donation by WILLIAMA  :-D ) that has some likelihood of nuking my Win7 installation for compatibility reasons. This is in a multiboot with Fedora 40 and Win10. For a plan B, I dug up an old vb instance on FC40 and installed my needed legacy JIM graphics software to it. With some skepticism. To my amazement, there is almost no discernible difference to running this software in virtualbox to running it on bare metal. Despite my vb instance being 32-bit (3.5G max ram), with 64 MB of assigned video memory, vs. bare metal 64-bit on 32G, with a 2G discreet graphics card. WTF? In fairness, the software in question is 32-bit and ran in compatibility mode on bare metal Win7.

Also, I used to hate Gnome 3 but I've grown to like it.

Yeah since all the clever VM stuff made it into the kernel, which I think even Virtualbox makes use of these days, VMs are kinda amazing.

And yeah both KDE and Gnome are really good atm. If I couldn't use a tiler for some reason I'd be quite happy on Gnome.

I'm now running my home server on Proxmox with a load of VMs. Love it. Much better way of achieving what I want.

I tried a couple of other hypervisors back when nothing worked all that well, but settled on vb because it's free (afaik there's no paid version with extra mojo), available on different platforms with feature parity (except Windows can access gpu 3d rendering), and I've been using it for years.

Oh yeah it works well these days. Wasn't disparaging it!