Hardware assisted virtualization shouldn’t necessarily be better than dynamic translation just because “hardware” in it. My experiments concluded that the best solution for desktop virtualization has been VirtualBox so far.

When I tried VMWare Player, it wouldn’t integrate into Arch linux well. It required a more stable kernel to build its modules. It has custom installer, custom scripts to update, uninstall. Not to mention that it’s closed source and not free for commercial use.

Then when I tried KVM, I was able to set up Windows 7. It was quite usable with SPICE. But then when I needed msys2, it turned out that graphics performance became unbearable.

So I got/returned to VirtualBox. It’s easy to install and maintain in my Arch linux, it offers exellent performance of guest Windows, good integration of desktops. Now, unlike KVM, it’d be possible to run on a station without CPU supporting virtualization. Hard to find today though.

One more note to put down: Oracle binary package seems to be more stable than OSE one. For instance, mouse pointer transparency is handled better.