I’m facing various issues when running Ubuntu Budgie in a virtual machine. I tried reproducing the issues using VMware Workstation 17.x.x, VirtualBox 7.x.x and KVM and got the same results on all systems. Running with 3D acceleration enabled is very slow and has rendering glitches. Those glitches also appear running a vanilla Ubuntu, however speed is not comparable. A simple login takes approx. 10 - 15 seconds. Also starting certain applications (firefox-esr, chrome) is significantly slower.
Disabling 3D acceleration speeds up the system. Login time drops down to 2 - 3 seconds on the same system and also app starting is faster. However, this brings up other issues. With 3D acceleration disabled, I face screen redraw issues (i.e. nemo, libreoffice, IntelliJ, PyCharme). For example, in LibreOffice opening the preferences dialog and clicking through the various categories on the left hand side brings up partially rendered dialogs. As soon as the dialog window is moved, the dialog gets refreshed and properly shown. IntelliJ shows black areas where nothing is rendered. These issues are not present in vanilla Ubuntu with 3D disabled, so that I assume they are related to the Budgie Desktop Environment.
Also it seems, that these issues are also no present when running on a physical system. However, I cannot tell this for sure since I was reluctant updating my physical system after facing these issues.
The described issues first occurred with 24.04 and are present in 25.04 as well. The screen refresh issues can also be reproduces by just running the live system from the installation ISO. 22.04 runs fine. Any suggestion how to get find the issues’ root cause od even better get rid of the described issues?
VMware and VirtualBox were tested on a Lenovo P16s Gen2 with a i7-1370P CPU, NVME SSD, 64GB RAM Intel and nvidia GPU. Both VMware and VB are configured to use the nvidia GPU (but I also tried forcing Intel). Host OS is Win11Pro 24H2.
KVM was tested on AMD Ryzen 3950X based system running Ubuntu Budgie 22.04 with a AMD RX580 GPU and NVME SSD.
All tests were made with 1CPU/4Cores, 16GB RAM, 64GB disk. Graphics configuration in VMware are default settings with/without 3D enabled, in VB VMSVGA. With KVM it tried virtio with/without 3D and QXL.
ok - my setup on VB running virtuals with no issues is similar - its a ryzen 4750 host. Using VB tick 3D accel - Graphics RAM must be 128Mb and VMSVGA with 2 or more vcpu’s and 8GB RAM allocated to the guest.
I’ve tried vmware in the past and generally have avoided because of vmware tools issues on the latest kernels. Haven’t tried QEMU/KVM for a while now so can’t really comment.
Generally though, I don’t use VM’s other than to-do quick installs and checks. I have a multiboot setup on my Ryzen with 22.04/24.04/22.10 and 2x 25.04 installs. No issues noticed as you have described. I always find physical installs behave much more predictably than virtuals.
OK - my VB configuration seems to be OK. 16GB RAM and 128MB video RAM were configured. I just tried on a Dell P5530 with an i9 CPU and both Intel and nvidia Quadro Pro GPU. Got the same results with both GPUs. Will try VB on the Ryzen system later and report the results.
Since the system on which I’m using the VM is the system provided by my employer I cannot do a physical install and use the VM for development purposes. Also colleagues faced the same issue on other Lenovo notebooks.
Just did the same tests with VB on my Ryzen 3950X system. Same results - with 3D enabled Budgie runs slowly, with 3D disabled screen not refreshed properly.
I agree. However, with 3D acceleration the system is performing pretty bad. And searching the web for Ubuntu 24.04 and vmware yields a lot of hits recommending disabling 3D acceleration to get rid of rendering glitches and also performance issues.
ok - just to check - in either your BIOS or EFI Settings you have turned on / tuned the various virtualisation options? Often they are off or are setup for non-virtual setups.