A few quality of life updates for desktop VMs

[stuffbucket]

Hello all,

I have a few small quality of life suggestions/ideas (with PRs / solutions) that I want to share with the team. I've been using lima for headless VMs for quite awhile, and recently started using UTM on my Mac. I hadn't noticed the video option on lima so spent some time trying to understand how to bring a GUI in for desktop VMs using Lima. Better late than never to find it while reviewing my branches in prep for a few PRs. Regardless, I'd still like to offer a few contributions / ideas if any of these resonate with others:

1. On macOS, the code-hex/vz drivers always put scrollbars on the desktop GUI. This has the effect of cutting off ~16px from the desktop area itself as they appear over the top of the desktop GUI from the VM. I have a small Objective-C runtime swizzle that turns those scrollbars off. I'm happy to submit to upstream for code-hex/vz as well, but in the meantime the GUI on macOS (at least for me) is very annoying to use.

2. For QEMU, I have a second PR that adds support for full audio routing with SPICE and support for input (microphone).

3. For VZ, I have a third PR that adds clipboard support, as well as video sizing options in the template (rather than the default 1920x1080). Setting the default video size is very handy when you are going to be taking a lot of screenshots. Clipboard support is very helpful on vz. Without it, I would end up having to set up SPICE, etc.

4. Last PR updates the experimental templates that are relevant to the above and adds a few for things like debian 13 w/ plasma desktop.

I am trying to get more people to use lima, and they'll need desktop support to be able to do that. The above are small but helpful additions. I'm sure the core team is chasing much harder problems to solve.

What do people think?

Thanks!

[afbjorklund]

Adding SPICE graphics and improving the built-in VZ graphics sounds like good additions, thank you for that.

The more advanced examples should probably not be included in Lima, but would be nice to link to (somewhere)

Had some similar thoughts before

• Providing graphical lima example #1002