Local-first
Virtual machines run on your hardware. There is no mandatory account, subscription, cloud service, or remote server.
About
Local control,
plainly stated.
Wave VM exists to make local virtual machines easier to understand and manage, without an account, a cloud dependency, or a hidden control plane.
Why Wave VM
Virtual machines should be understandable.
Virtual machines are useful for testing software, isolating a development environment, or keeping an older system available. The setup around them is often harder to understand than it needs to be.
Wave VM aims to be approachable for beginners while remaining useful to experienced developers. That means showing what the host can actually do, explaining what is missing, and avoiding controls that imply functionality that does not exist.
The project is local-first by design. It does not require an account, subscription, cloud service, or remote server, and it will never bundle complete guest operating system images in the installer.
Principles
What guides the work
These principles are constraints on the product, not marketing claims. The current implementation is still small, and the documentation says so.
Honest status
The interface and documentation separate implemented behavior from planned work. Missing capabilities are reported, not simulated.
Safe by default
Wave VM does not require root, does not silently elevate privileges, and keeps virtualization control interfaces local.
Open development
The source is public under the MIT License and development is documented. Third-party dependencies retain their own licenses.
Technology
Chosen for local control
The stack is deliberately small. The status on each item describes the inspected implementation, not an intention to use the technology. libvirt is not required; direct QEMU integration is the current direction.
Tauri 2
Available nowDesktop shell and native command boundary.
Rust backend
Available nowHost detection, configuration, and process-facing logic.
Vanilla web frontend
Available nowHTML, CSS, and JavaScript without a UI framework.
QEMU integration
Available nowDiscovery, QCOW2 disk creation, launch, and start/stop lifecycle control.
QMP control
Available nowPrivate Unix-socket control for the implemented start and stop path.
VNC and noVNC console
Available nowLoopback-only guest display through QEMU WebSocket VNC and noVNC.
Versioned JSON configuration
Available nowSchema-v2 config.json with VM definitions, atomic writes, and restrictive permissions.
Open development
Public source. No release yet.
The desktop repository is public and can be inspected. The website repository is public as well. There is no installer, no tagged release, and no published version that can be described as production-ready.
Wave VM is released under the MIT License. Third-party dependencies and any separately licensed assets retain their own licenses. The project is being developed in the open, but it is not production-ready.
Wave VM is not a cloud service, a libvirt wrapper, or a bundle of guest operating systems. It is a small desktop application being built one verified slice at a time.