I’ve been using VirtualBox for a year now and I’m getting pretty ticked every time I have to start a new Ubuntu VM. I speed more time going to root shell prompt to add myself to sudoers file, add myself to groups, the addons, shared folder and storage not mounting right away…… etc etc. I’m sure I might be not using VirtualBox to its full potential to avoid long setup times but I feel like I shouldn’t have to deal with this. It should act is it being installed on a bare metal machine. Is there a more modern approach? Something more streamlined? FYI I’m learning containers and miniKube so I’m not jumping in the deep end yet.
There’s many ways to do this. Saving the disk state is one, I believe that’s what the other person suggested - essentially stores the disk as an image which then you use for future vms as your jumping off point. This is also essentially how workstations are deployed at companies. (Essentially being the key word). Cloud providers have different names for this too, in AWS this is called their AMI.
Another option is Ansible, which essentially handles deploying a VM by running your scripts for you. I haven’t played too much with this, and I doubt it works with VirtualBox, but it’s something you may want to look into, it would definitely uplevel your skills.
Thirdly is dependent on what you actually use your VM for, you haven’t given your use cases but this is one of the reasons containerization became such a thing - because when running an app we mostly don’t care about the underlying system. It may be worth it to learn about docker.