this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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That seems far from minimal. A bare metal virtualisation manager like promox should fit the job much better with no actual overhead.
They specifically asked for a desktop operating system, so I recommended systems with a GUI. Proxmox comes with its own bloat, Arch would be far more minimal without the need for a bunch of dependencies.
Proxmox is based on debian, with it's own virtualization packages and system services that do something very similar to what libvirt does.
Libvirr + virt manager also uses qemu kvm as it's underlying virtual machine software, meaning performance will be identical.
Although perhaps there will be a tiny difference due to libvirt's use of the more performant spice for graphics vs proxmox's novnc but it doesn't really matter.
The true minimal setup is to just use qemu kvm directly, but the virtual machine performance will be the same as libvirt, in exchange for a very small reduction in overhead.