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VM-curator

a TUI alternative to libvirt and virt-manager

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I've long wanted to harness QEMU/KVM for my desktop virtual machines, but I'm befuddled by virt-manager's lack of support for working NVIDIA 3D acceleration, dogmatic embrace of ugly XML, and the puzzling UI decision of having to click what seems like 15 buttons to attach an ISO to a VM image. When I further learned that NVIDIA's broken 3D acceleration is the fault of libvirt as opposed to QEMU's virtio driver, I had an idea...Behold, vm-curator! A fast and friendly VM management TUI written in Rust. You can create, configure, organize, and manage VMs directly with QEMU. No libvert. No XML. No wonky UI's. Just the right level of friendliness, customization, and speed to be really really useful.The best part? 3D para-virtualization works with NVIDIA cards (via virtio-vga-gl!) No jumping through hoops to get GPU passthrough working!(Disclaimer: This works great with other guest Linux VMs, but is not suitable for Windows gaming. If you want to game on Windows within a VM, passthrough is a must. vm-curator will have fast and friendly support soon.)Looking for contributors (especially to help with the ascii art,) and donations are welcome. (Claude was a big help, but this was not a vibe-coded affair. We pair-programmed approx. 10,000 lines of code here. It was a great way to learn Rust, actually!)

HN · launched Jan 25, 2026 · 42 upvotes (top 24%) · 1 view

Niche: os virtualization and vm management software · 61 launches, 1 in the last 7 days ▼ -88% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Horizontal
  • Dev tools
  • Developer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

More like this: all 61 launches in os virtualization and vm management software →

Could you build this?

No Replacing virt-manager requires deep low-level Linux systems programming, interacting directly with QEMU commands, KVM ioctls, VFIO GPU passthrough, and complex hardware virtualization configurations.

What it would actually take: The system requires a systems language like Rust, Go, or C communicating with libvirt C bindings or managing QEMU directly via QMP (QEMU Machine Protocol). The critical challenges include configuring VFIO driver unbinding, IOMMU grouping, kernel module parameters for NVIDIA GPU passthrough, bridge networking setup via netlink/iproute2, and handling low-level hypervisor state safely without crashing the host system.

Discussion

11 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: quickemu, libvirt, Looking-Glass, EnvyControl, supergfxctl

Concerns raised: USB passthrough doesn't work stably with libvirt, 3D para-virtualization not supported on NVIDIA consumer GPUs, Single-GPU passthrough limits VM to one instance at a time, Legal/maintenance issues with bundling proprietary OS profiles

Feature requests: GPU device selection GUI for hybrid iGPU/dGPU systems, NVIDIA GPU virtualization splitting for multiple VMs, Automatic OS installation media fetching/download, Multi-GPU IOMMU passthrough support

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 780 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #201 of 781 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 86 days after the earliest competitor.

Related data

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.