Virtual Machine or Dual Boot?

[TomS_]

The problem is even if I spend considerable amount of time in one OS, I need to access the second one quite often - even for the short period of time. It can become very annoying with dual boot.

This is about the reason why I gave up on dual boot. It seems much more productive for me to run my secondary OS as a VM. Usually some flavor of Windows along side MacOS.

Usually I'm only using one or two applications in the other OS, perhaps along side applications running in the primary OS, and having access to both at the same time is worth what ever performance penalty there might be.

[Halcyon]

For the most part, I prefer virtualisation. It makes backing up your core image and reverting back to a known clean version very simple.

[MatteoX]

How much performance do you loose by running Linux under VM? I have some numerically pretty intensive stuff.

Any general preference between VirtualBox and free VMWare Player? Compatibility with special hardware, speed ...?

[brucehoult]

Computationally intensive shouldn't see any slowdown at all. What can be slower is I/O, especially graphics. Any hit on disk or network I/O is usually very small.

[BravoV]

Computationally intensive shouldn't see any slowdown at all. What can be slower is I/O, especially graphics. Any hit on disk or network I/O is usually very small.

Especially for graphics, in VM environment, the so called (cmiiw) IOMMU or GPU Pass through have been quite heavily exploited for years.

Just an example video out of so many out there, fyi, the video is dated back to 2017, he run Windows graphic heavy intensive game, under Linux host with almost at native speed.

[chriva]

Computional performance is pretty much identical between a native os and a virtualized one these days.

USB devices have never given me a grief in vmware workstation and virtualbox has worked flawlessly for the last two years or so.
I'd try to run Linux as the Virtualized OS tho since modern versions of windows are quite dependand on 3d acceleration for the gui, something that on the other hand _IS_ very nerfed in virtual machines. Virtualbox in particular have very thrashy 3d support so go workstation if you really want Windows to be the virtual one.

GPU passthrough has iffy support at best so if you intend to do cuda/opencl or play games on either one of the OS's, that OS should be the primary one.


Lastly: Linux SUCKS for entertainment, lacks hardware decoding for most video formats and rarely has full support for the more advanced power saving features. Mostly because hw manufacturers are assholes so I'd really suggest you use Windows as the native one if you have any intention of using it for entertainment on the go.

Dualboot is just a waste of your time if you ask me so it's not even a question

[fourtytwo42]

Hmm maybe I look at this a different way, I transitioned to Lubuntu several years ago as my primary platform BUT I find WINE has many problems that means dual boot is still an unfortunate necessity, for example

Microsoft word does not run properly under wine, particularly at page boundaries it gets completely confused
Microsoft Excell also suffer annoyingly
LTspice simply does not work properly, quite a few calculations go awry
MPLAB 8x cannot access USB devices in fact USB support under wine generally for non-generic drivers is a fiasco

As an engineer I am sensitive to such things and for me dual boot remains a necessity, there are many other compatibility issues too numerous to mention

So my short answer to the OP is by all means use translators such as wine but retain a dual boot capability for all the important stuff the translators cannot handle.
 

[brucehoult]

Hmm maybe I look at this a different way, I transitioned to Lubuntu several years ago as my primary platform BUT I find WINE has many problems that means dual boot is still an unfortunate necessity, for example

A virtual machine, such as VirtualBox, is completely different to a mere API converter such as WINE.

WINE tries to provide API libraries which are compatible with code in Windows.
VirtualBox runs an actual copy of Windows, and emulates generic PC hardware, which is a much more well-defined and simpler task.

[NiHaoMike]

Lastly: Linux SUCKS for entertainment, lacks hardware decoding for most video formats and rarely has full support for the more advanced power saving features. Mostly because hw manufacturers are assholes so I'd really suggest you use Windows as the native one if you have any intention of using it for entertainment on the go.

Not true nowadays.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_acceleration#Comparison_tables

BTW, it's trivial to get bit perfect audio on Linux if you disable Pulseaudio.

[chriva]

 I see many modern codecs that are not supported on that list...

[NiHaoMike]

I see many modern codecs that are not supported on that list...

Like what? I see MPEG 4 ("classic" and AVC/H.264), H.265/HEVC, VP8, VP9, and even VC-1 (WMV) in the list.

[jmelson]

First consideration is whether the software you want to run will work adequately under virtualization. I suspect windows applications are more likely to be picky about that than Linux applications, but it depends a lot on the specific software.  You may just have to try it and see.  If you have software that talks to specific USB hardware that may be a deal breaker.

I run Linux as my main OS.  I have used virtual Windows environments for many years, first with VMWare, now with VirtualBox.  These work very well, and allow me to switch back and forth, or even have programs from both environments on the desktop at the same time.

I run Protel 99SE for electronic CAD and a tax perparation program every year in the virtual envoronment.  They run fine, in fact even better than on real hardware.

The only program I have ever had a problem with was a Garmin program to download new GPS data to a GPS device.  It would not run on a virtual environment with a specific message to that effect.

Jon