I have a friend thats setting up linux (ubuntu) on his machine. He has a windows installation. I personally use mac as my primary OS, but I’ve had a linux partition on my machine as well, and I’m having a slightly hard time giving him good advice as to what solution he should choose when setting up linux (I don’t even know how I would partition a disk on a windows machine to prep it for dual booting).
My question is quite simple: What are the pros/cons of WSL vs. Dual Booting vs. Virtualbox, both with regards to setup and with regards to usage?
WSL windows street legal… cant take m$ threads serious.
Windows as a daily driver, want to do some development / docker usage based on Linux - WSL. Also you can if I remember correctly only run windows containers on windows as well as linux containers. You cant run windows containers on a linux host
You want to daily drive Linux but sometimes swap back to windows for some specific purpose (like specific games or applications that proton doesnt work with), Dual Boot
Only reason I would use virtualbox over WSL is if I need to work with a fully fledged Linux OS. I havent needed to do this since WSL though
To prep for dual booting, simplest is to have windows installed first then use the graphical installer from Linux distro which lets you select a partition to split, resize and setup GRUB etc. Very easy to do. BACK YOUR SHIT UP THOUGH
Depends on their specific needs, so they should probably jump into some Linux community and ask for themselves.
My anecdotal evidence includes vastly different experiences.
I have a friend who hates Linux desktop and exclusively uses it for running dev related stuff via WSL.
Another who uses Linux desktop primarely, but dualboots Windows for certain games.
And I am on Linux single boot and rarely use KVM (without GPU) for running my CNC or other software.
In my book WSL and VM share the same downside in that you’re only abstracting Linux functionality in relation to the hardware.
Linux really shines when it has full access to the actual hardware as opposed to asking it’s environment nicely if it’s allowed to do something.
For example, I routinely need to change my IP address to talk to specific networks and network hosts, but having to step over the virtualisation or interpretation layer to do so is just another step, thus removing the advantage of running linux in the first place.
Sure, VMs and dual booting have their uses, but the same uses can be serviced by an actual linux install while also being infinitely more powerful.
I played around with WSL for a while, but you notice really quickly that it is not the real thing. I’ve used virtual box for some use cases, but that too feels limiting ad all of the hardware you want to fully control is only abstracted.
I would say that unless he has a really good reason why he wouldn’t want to go for dual boot, then he should do just that.
Dual boot
