On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 07:31:32PM -0600, Michael Siepmann wrote: > What about running Windows as a virtual machine in VirtualBox on > GNU/Linux? That's what I'm doing currently. I'd appreciate any > insights or advice about the pros and cons of that approach.
I think that's fine, however VirtualBox will encourage you to install proprietary modules for USB 2.0 and other virtual hardware, so you have to be careful. It also requires recompiling a kernel module every time you do perform a kernel upgrade or VirtualBox upgrade, which gets annoying. You can't use such virtual machines for DirectX 10+ applications either (although this can sometimes be accomplished via other means such as Xen PCI passthrough, depending on the hardware). Shockingly, many laptops still seem to be sold with only 4Gb of RAM, which isn't ideal for virtualizing Windows. Further, most people acquire Windows OEM licenses with their hardware. These generally are very troublesome to get working in a virtual machine because they look for the specific hardware the installation shipped with to activate (or sometimes to even run), and VirtualBox masks most of that. If you've got the RAM, a retail Windows license, no need for high-end accelerated graphics or USB 2.0, and Wine won't do the trick, VirtualBox is definitely worth considering.
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