For me this falls in the category of “sit back and eat popcorn”. Both sides are arseholes I don’t mind which loses, in fact it’s a shame they all can’t lose

Disappointing tgat we arent when you put it that way

You don’t need to give the VM network access to download the software if you have a linux host. You can directly mount a virtual box drive from the host, copy the file(s) onto the drive and then unmount it and start the VM as per normal.

Search for qemu-nbd iirc (network block device) - I have the how to details saved on my host (ie not on me) so ping me if you want them. Note it’s a qemu app that works for vbox

Could be worth asking on selfhosted (how do I link a sub on lemmy ?) They probably have more relevant experience at this sort of thing.

Edit

Does this work ?

https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted

Popular support rarely changes anything. Money talks to power, people talk to themselves

Definitely on there

Yup. Nvidia are installable on any linux distro, some just have tools to make it easy.

I don’t recommend ubuntu but it has an easy to use device manager that makes installing nvidia straight forward.

I would suggest you look instead at Mint which has all the good stuff from ubuntu with all the cruft removed