Much of this shittiness seems to be due to Red Hat engineers smoking crack and deciding that "let's pipe the entire VM's framebuffer through a SPICE Unix socket instead of just using shared memory" was a good idea. (I've been told that there were probably other drugs and corresponding bad decisions involved in the shittiness too.)

And that's where virt-gtk comes in. With virt-gtk, you can run an existing VM (created in virt-manager) using standard QEMU with the standard GTK GUI (no SPICE). It's much less laggy than virt-manager, audio works fine, and VM's show up in your desktop launcher where you can easily search for them.

But what's the catch?

virt-gtk runs QEMU with less sandboxing than virt-manager:

virt-gtk gives QEMU access to X11.
virt-gtk runs QEMU under the audio and netdev groups.
virt-gtk disables QEMU's seccomp sandboxing.

This means that virt-gtk has less security against malicious VM's than virt-manager does. I am admittedly unhappy about this, and I would be excited to receive community contributions that fix this.

On the other hand, if virt-manager's security comes at the cost of making VM's so painful to use that you wind up doing some things without VM's at all, then virt-gtk is probably better security for you. Unusable security isn't real security.

Instructions

First, create your VM's in virt-manager, just like you would normally.

Then, run the following:

sudo ./virt-gtk-update

This will create an application in your desktop launcher for each VM that you currently have. You'll need to redo this step whenever you create, delete, or rename a VM.

To run a VM, just choose it in your desktop launcher (it'll be in the System category). You can search for VM's in your desktop launcher just like you would search for other applications.

What, were you hoping it would be more complicated than that?

Installing an OS

If you would like to run the OS installer inside virt-gtk, do the following:

Create the VM in virt-manager as normal, choosing the installation media image inside virt-manager.
As soon as virt-manager launches the VM and the installer shows the GRUB boot menu, force-power-off the VM.
Go to virt-manager settings, and re-select the installation media image for the CDROM device.
Re-enable the CDROM device in the Boot Options list.
Run sudo virt-gtk-update.
Launch the VM in virt-gtk.
Once the installer has finished, you can optionally remove the media image for the CDROM device, disable booting from CDROM, and/or remove the CDROM device completely.

Credits

virt-gtk is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

virt-gtk is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with virt-gtk. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Greetings to JTL, RobbieAB, dormito, A. Wilcox, Hugo Landau, Rose Turing, and Marty Rand for keeping me company during development.