I run a qemu/KVM setup in which I have different VMs for different use cases/profiles. Very similar in theory to something like Qubes OS. So far when I want to swap to another VM I have to first un-fullscreen, then click the other VM display window and fullscreen that. I was beginning to work on hotkeys and scripts to allow switching between VMs by assigning Ctrl+NumPad# to specific VMs and then having the triggered VM appear in full screen. But I’m imagining there’s probably already a VM display manager that streamlines this.
Does anybody have any suggestions?
The biggest factor is that the display needs to be responsive as I’m using these VMs for daily tasks.
Bonus points if the display manager can output a variable for the currently focused VM so I can script the keyboard backlight to change to an assigned color as well as change the power profile of the base operating system to match the currently highlighted VM better.
This may not be exactly what you want, but I use Apache guacamole for this. The client becomes a web browser, and a chromium based browser allows seamless bidirectional clipboard. I use Ubuntu VMs with Mate as the DM and with a few keybinds tweaked it is solid. I use tightVNC as my server which supports dynamic resize, and the soon to be released guacamole 1.6 supports sending dynamic resize (since the underlying libraries are now updated to support it; RDP in guac already supports dynamic resize). How performant is it? I have a single proxmox vm which runs 3 Minecraft instances for our server’s 3 bot accounts (which just stand still) and the desktop is still navigable.
I know it’s not exactly what you want, but I use Apache Guacamole to connect/switch between my VMs running on Proxmox, mostly Windows RDP, but also several SSH and VNC. it supports full screen and is fairly responsive for daily admin tasks.
