I hate the vbox project more than redhat-isms because it's using bundled qt6.
Thing just decides it's not going to respect your theme no matter what, they want it apple-white so it's apple-white everywhere.
VMware player which BTW also uses redhat-like init.d, at the very least it lets one change a GTK theme.

Typical, isn't it? Qt6 they have to pay for, don't they? While python is past EOL.

BTW, qt6 is well hidden. I found /usr/lib64/cmake/Qt6, but that was just a symlink to Qt5. /Opt/VirtualBox has several libQt5 components, but I don't see Qt6 in version 6.1.34

What I do see is rdesktop.tar.gz in /opt/VirtualBox, which I hadn't noticed. Is that independently useful?

Depends on version, but basically it's libQt*XcbQpaVBox.so that prevents qt* recoloring. Mismatch with shipped version, more or less.
The rdesktop is optional so not an issue for me. I never used it, but I know it's something like MS version of vnc or something.

Went to double check this in my backups, version 6.1 uses qt5v6.1 while in Slackware it's qt5v15.3
So, my bad for shortening the toolkit version more than usual.. qt6.x is only used in bleeding edge systems like Fedora IIRC.
Either way, I've tried it around winter and also thought about "Removing all traces" so I only have it in some backups now.

I'm only installing it because I have reason to hope that the windoze version of Zoom is less vomit-inducing than the linux version. Also, you only have client software in Linux.

I currently have some version of windows installing. I wasn't given much choice, but I think it's windows 7 which would suit my old laptop as it's embarrassed for resources. (My pc upgrade is still being fired together by some hung-over techie in nether parts of the country). It might be 7,or 8,8.1,10 or even 11. I'll find out.

Looking around, VirtualBox seems to keep itself inside /opt/VirtualBox. Programs which aim themselves at /opt are typically self-contained as regards libs, except for the posix stuff it can rely on. VB-6.1.34 has a few libQt5<stuff>.so.5 so I reckon your backups are newer than my install.

EDIT: Windows is set to take days to install. Even the little circles of dots are moving with great difficulty. I've seen better performance from a Z80!

It really is bad.. Some folks must have it for remote work, so I have seen it at one point.
Video chat clients have one thing in common, they require hardware acceleration.
Not sure how would you do that in virtualbox, I only know that on VMware there's a config option:
That makes it possible to use acceleration with the default open source nouveau driver.
Otherwise, without the option, you're basically forced to use the binary driver if you want virtualized video chat.

No, it's actually qt5 v6.1 (5.6.1) and not qt6 v1.0 (6.1.0).

Well it seems I ended with windows 10, which swaps continually, so that's coming off again.

Video is an absolute mess here, acceleration --> 0 on this HD4000. I may wait for the upgrade.

Does the web version not work? I've used that several times back when our work Windows systems didn't have zoom installed (that was dumb... we were initially using zoom for every conceivable meeting, but let's not install the client on our systems and let's not let users install software on their computers -- it took about six months until the client ended up finally getting pushed to our systems).

Granted, I've only tried the web version on Windows using Chrome, but I don't see why it would have issues on Linux web browsers...

I'm not sure if that's actually true.

My laptop has the NVidia Optimus chipset, which is basically a hybrid Intel/NVidia GPU. I run it with the NVidia part disabled, because it chews through the battery life and I mainly use this machine for work.

The GPU uses the Intel i915 driver which is included in the Linux kernel, I'm not sure if it's accelerated or not but I certainly haven't done anything to configure it if so. I can tell you that it's not using nouveau, because that driver doesn't work on this chipset... and I've blacklisted it anyway.

I regularly use zoom on this machine without issues. It's running Slackware.

The installer looks for /var/log/vbox-install.log. If it finds this file, then you'll get the message above.

If you get poor performance natively, then it'll be significantly worse in a VM on the same hardware.
VirtualBox is entirely self contained. The whole thing installs under /opt. Apart from that it makes a few symlinks in certain spots... eg: /usr/bin, /usr/share/applications, etc... And adds a few files to /var/log. The customised libs that it uses aren't linked anywhere else. Assuming you use the pre-compiled binary.
You need to give Windows (any version from Vista/7 onwards) at least 3Gb of RAM or it runs like a pig, in my experience.

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Well if glxinfo returns: "direct rendering: Yes" then it's accelerated.
BTW nouveau is also accelerated by default, but the VM software marks it unstable for whatever reason.
Difference is that intel driver's not a reversed driver, it's an official driver from the vendor.
Optimus I don't know much about except it's found in consumer laptops which I've never had.

I managed to sit up windows 7 in the VM last night under a replacement VB-6.1.34. I've set up nothing yet, and never used Windows 7 before. Any idea how much ram it uses? Will 3G keep it happy with light use?

EDIT:From what I can gather, windoze 7 is filling 3G but not swapping out.

If you used XP: it's mostly the same unsupported blob, key difference (for me) is that audio services changed a lot.
Disk space usage, almost double.. Disk utilization, almost triple. Swap file size, double the RAM size.
Compositing window manager (optional) requires acceleration.
That's pretty much it from my point of view, but it's very offtopic for this thread, subforum, and LQ in general..
Maybe it'd be best to ask here.