Virtual machines

If you want to install and test Ditana inside a virtual machine, your choice of virtualization software will heavily influence your experience.

Ditana ships with four modern desktop environments (XFCE, Wayfire, Niri, and COSMIC). Wayland compositors like Wayfire, Niri, and COSMIC are built around modern 3D hardware acceleration. Consequently, they require a virtual machine capable of passing 3D graphics instructions through to your host system.

Recommended: QEMU / KVM / UTM

Hypervisors based on KVM (Linux) or Apple’s Hypervisor framework (macOS) expose a modern, highly capable virtual graphics card known as virtio-gpu.

• Examples: GNOME Boxes, virt-manager (Linux), UTM (macOS Apple Silicon).
• Support: Full.
• What works: All four desktop environments (including Niri) will be available and run smoothly, provided you enable 3D acceleration (e.g., virgl or Venus) in your VM’s display settings.

Not recommended: VirtualBox & VMware

VirtualBox and VMware rely on older, legacy-style virtual graphics drivers (vmwgfx). While they offer a “3D Acceleration” checkbox in their settings, their architecture lacks the modern Linux graphics stack features (like full GBM support) required by demanding Wayland compositors.

• Support: Fallback mode.
• What happens: Ditana detects these hypervisors during installation and automatically applies a CPU-rendering fallback for Wayfire and COSMIC to ensure your system still boots successfully into a graphical session.
• Limitations: Animations may be less smooth, as your CPU is doing the work of a graphics card. Furthermore, the Niri desktop environment will be hidden from the installer, as it strictly refuses to launch without proper native 3D hardware.

If you must use VirtualBox or VMware, the traditional XFCE (X11) desktop environment remains a very fast and reliable choice.

(For technical details on how the installer identifies your hardware and decides what to install, see Hardware detection).