desktop
Graphical Linux desktop with accelerated virtio-gpu (virgl). Boots a distro cloud image and cloud-init installs a minimal GNOME + Mesa GL/Vulkan stack with GDM autologin. Works on Apple Silicon (aarch64).
The GUI comes up on the first boot: provisioning switches the running system to graphical.target once GDM is installed, so no power-cycle is needed after vee create. Gate on provisioning with vee wait <name> --cloud-init. The autologin session never locks — screen locking and idle blanking are disabled system-wide (dconf) so unattended sessions stay usable for screenshots and UI automation.
vee create workstation --template desktop --distro fedora
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Memory | 8G |
| CPUs | 4 |
| Disk | 20G qcow2 (COW overlay on cloud image) |
| Network | User-mode NAT |
| Display | virtio-gpu (GL) |
| UEFI | Yes |
--distro selects the base OS:
| Distro | Notes |
|---|---|
fedora | Default. @base-x + gnome-shell/gnome-session/nautilus/gnome-control-center + GDM, Wayland autologin |
ubuntu | ubuntu-desktop-minimal + gdm3, Wayland autologin |
omarchy | Delegates to the omarchy template: an unattended install of Omarchy’s Arch + Hyprland desktop from its own ISO (no cloud image, no cloud-init) |
Other distros are rejected.
The desktop renders through virtio-gpu-gl. On Linux hosts this uses the host GPU via virgl; on macOS it uses the Cocoa GL backend (see macOS host). A virgl-capable QEMU is required for hardware acceleration — otherwise rendering falls back to software (llvmpipe).