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?
Maybe, another consideration might be to not run Linux on Windows in some way, but the other way around.
Linux offers great virtualization, maybe you can use QEMU with KVM and GPU passthrough, and then run Windows inside this box.
I find Linux more powerful and less annoying to use day to day, and having those annoyances inside a small virtualized container I can just shut down is more peaceful.
WSL can be restricting, since Linux can’t access anything, and I think getting “the real and proper thing” might be better.
And dual booting, by having both Windows and Linux on the same drive, is something I would advise against. Windows doesn’t play nice with others and often “accidentally” breaks the bootloader and hard drive permissions, leading only to trouble. If you dual boot, install them on a separate drive and select the booting drive manually in the BIOS.
Also, why do you want to run Ubuntu specifically? Did you also look up for alternatives, like Fedora or Debian?
Most people are running Windows OEM licenses that don’t transfer to VMs. A retail license you can move around.
Are you sure?
It has activation issues as the license is tied to hardware. If you have a retail license tied to your account it will prompt you to transfer from another machine, OEM does not. Nowadays people don’t even get a key, although it can be extracted from the firmware.
a retail license doesn’t even prompt that, just sign in with your MS account and bobs your uncle, that’s how I manage all of my VM stuff I just sign into my primary Microsoft account and it automatically activates, I’m sure one of these days it’s going to hit a Hidden activation limit but I’m not really sure how Windows works with that, I don’t change vm’s all that often.
My main bottleneck for swapping fully off of dual booting is the annoyance when it comes to trying to configure GPU pass through with KVM, I would definitely be using that virtual machine for gaming on the few games that no longer work using proton but like it’s such a pain in the butt to set up, that and for the duration of me having to transfer the system I basically need to have twice the amount of disk space because I need to clone that data over to an image before being able to free up the partitions