Today I got a chance to begin a very minimal bit of configuration for my five Solus VMs, such as a new Solus user might do after installing Solus on a computer. In most cases, I changed to a dark theme, created four workspaces to help me with maintenance, and used eopkg to do the remaining upgrades that weren't in Friday's update.
In that process (in an X11 session) I attempted to work with the VMs at full-screen, since Oracle seems to have been working on that lately. Of the five Solus VMs, Budgie, Plasma, and Xfce gave me no concerns in any way. (Other than Xfce is understandably still sluggish in some respects, because it's not release-level software yet.)
My GNOME VM now boots to a black screen. I've seen that before with other distros, so I changed the VirtualBox video adapter from VBoxSVGA (that we use with Solus VMs and others) to VMSVGA, the other choice. Then the GNOME VM was able to boot to a login screen. After I logged in, however, its behavior was still flawed. Although it could be taken to full screen with HOST+F, the VM's image remained the same size, and at full screen, it was in the middle of a very thick black border. If I changed its video resolution to 1920x1080 in the system settings, I could then make it full screen, but when toggled back to a smaller size, it had vertical and horizontal scroll bars.
The MATE VM behaved the same as GNOME, although it was fine with the VBoxSVGA video adapter. But it required setting its video resolution to 1920x1080 in order to use it a full-screen, and when toggled to its original smaller size, it ended up with scroll bars instead of a smaller image of the VM's output.
I'm not going to shed any tears over MATE, because it's no secret that it won't be around much longer. I'm more concerned with GNOME. Booting to a black screen without its preferred video adapter makes it different from all our other editions. And I'm well aware that even GNOME might work well on bare hardware.
