VirtualBox Setup

The Situation

My setups with ARM weren't doing so great, so I wanted to try using Oracle's VirtualBox. Specifically, I was running into issues setting up desktop environments. Certain OS's I wanted to play with didn't offer images for ARM architecture. In the future, I might try setting up dual booting, possibly with Arch.

Installation and setup

The installation was relatively straightforward. I got the .deb file from Oracle's page. I then ran

sudo dpkg -i <blah>

where <blah> represents the name of the uncompressed file. I ran into a small error, where one package wasn't there, libqt5openg15. I installed it, then ran

sudo apt --fix-broken install

That fixed the issue. You'll also need to go get .iso image of the OS you want. In my case, I went with Debian 10.5.0 with the XFCE desktop environment for 64-bit systems . Since I was installing Debian, I basically followed an excellent tutorial by linuxhint . The version of VirtualBox is a bit different, but the steps to follow are largely the same.

My Thoughts

I think I'll start with what I liked.

Pros

It’s ridiculously easy to set up
XFCE seems a tad lighter than GNOME

Cons

Within the computer, though, it's a nightmare to get basic customization done. For example, getting a terminal to open up and customizing the default applications took a bit more effort than I would have liked.
Working with a virtual box is really, really slow

Overall, my biggest issues were the speed and how nonintuitive customization was. I think I'd prefer something that didn't try to guess what I want.