Linux

I use virt-manager. Works better than virtualbox did at the time (back while v6.1 was still the main release branch), it's easier, and it doesn't involve hitching yourself to Oracle.

VMWare may be "free," but it ain't free. And if you don't care about software freedom, why choose Linux over Windows or MacOS? Also, Workstation Player lacks a lot of functionality that makes it not good as a hypervisor. Only one VM can be powered at a time, and all the configuration is severely limited. Plus the documentation is mediocre compared to the official virt-manager docs.

I'm a Virt Manager guy, personally. The only thing is 3D acceleration is usually hard if not impossible in some cases without GPU passthrough. (Unless I'm wrong. I'd like to be wrong.)

Alongside many others, I agree that using QEMU through GUI frontends like virt-manager or GNOME Boxes, or even server-focused solutions like Cockpit+VM plugin or Proxmox layered on top of your installation.

I just want to note a decent point against other solutions like VirtualBox or the VMWare products that work on Linux: these solutions that don't rely on QEMU almost certainly need the user to install out-of-tree kernel modules (that in some cases may also be proprietary). QEMU and its frontends don't need out-of-tree modules in a majority of distros and can work out of the box with all features (given BIOS configuration of the host and hardware supports them).

I tried virt-manager, but I still prefer Virtualbox myself

If you use GNOME, try Boxes.

Virt-manager

Virtual manager and maybe gnome boxes. I don't like gnome boxes as it hides a lot of settings but has poor defaults.

VMware Player is the best by far in terms of GUI and ease of use. With that said:

• It breaks once in a while due to kernel module / kernel mismatches that sometimes require manual patching. This is rare but it happens once every couple of years
• It may become paid given Broadcom's corporate history

Virt-manager is pretty decent and it will not break on a stable distro but:

• Some of it workflows are far from intuitive
• Virtualization via virt-manager (really KVM) doesn't currently have any 3D acceleration for Windows VMs
• Windows driver/guest tools installation and integration isn't nearly as trivial as it is with VMware

Personally, I'd try using virt-manager because it will work "forever." If you can't get something to work and feel overwhelmed, go to VMware for now but long term you'll likely have to get used to virt-manager.

For desktop: virt-manager, server: cockpit with the vm plugin.

I'm going to be greybeard: you should totally use kvm/qemu, and virt-manager is great for that.

Buuuuuuut, you should also absolutely learn how to use virsh to at least manage (start/stop/delete/deploy) them, because that tooling is guaranteed to exist basically anywhere and fancy gui stuff might not, or your system might be broken in a way preventing you from running a gui app, or whatever.

I promise, the hardest thing in virsh is setting up a bridged network if you need that and the rest of it is waaay simpler than dealing with a gui for deployment.

Gnome Boxes has worked pretty well for me.

I am a huge fan of proxmox, since I first tried it out.

It does a little bit more than just VM's.

On my home server, I have the proxmox distro running as the only service on bare metal, and then all other work is done in the VM's.

Proxmox, the free version does everything you want, VM's and containers.

You can use VirtualBox on linux as well, not bad for beginners.

I've not used it much but I'm pretty sure GNOME Boxes can be used as a UI for QEMU, KVM, and libvirt .

Virtual Machine Manager is a great GUI frontend for KVM/libvirt and QEMU, and basically the gold standard for VM management on Linux

https://virt-manager.org/