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.
I’d take a look at packer and ansible. Packer can be used to prepare a new base image for your VMs. And ansible can be used to automate the provisioning of a VM once it’s booted.