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.
Some good advice already in this thread.
Also worth considering QEMU as an alternative to VirtualBox. The Virt-manager tool is decent way of managing machines, and it’s relatively straight forward to create a base machine if you’re duplicating it. Virtualbox is perhaps initially more user friendly for absolute beginners, but once you have any familiarity with virtualization I’d suggest QEMU offers much more.
Also I find integration between the guest and the host linux system is generally more straight forward. Most linux systems already ship with samba and other relevant tools QEMU uses to interact between host and guest. There isn’t a need to faff around with the guest-additions stuff. Plus KVM virtual machines can run with near native performance.