On 2020-01-22 11:36, David Kastrup wrote:
Han-Wen Nienhuys <[email protected]> writes: A posiitive: all major platforms run on x86 64-bit CPUs, and there are Open Source VM solutions for OSX and Windows. So, a VM running Linux on OSX or Windows can be almost as fast as running Linux directly. This makes GUB's cross compilation to other architectures superfluous. In ancient times, I've had to be the guinea pig for VMware in a large company and the experience was not thrilling: two of the typical problems were that not the full power of a 2-CPU computer was made available to Linux, only part of the RAM (and the basic RAM was getting managed by Windows) and mapping the file system through a Windows file system was really bad since Linux is so much faster in that regard. That particularly concerned Git use which really depends on fast file system operations. Creating a virtual disk helped somewhat, creating an actual partition for Linux helped quite more. At some point of time I started booting that partition, and, well, the experiment did not deliver a lot more relevant data afterwards... I have no experience with Docker and containers. That was a full VM at the time.
I recently installed Ubuntu within the Windows Subsystem for Linux in Windows 10 and installed the standard Linux package of Lilypond therein, which runs very smoothly. Our sys. admins don't give us admin rights for our Win 10 installation, so this is the first time for many years that I've been able to run Lilypond on that computer. For the same reason, I haven't been able to benchmark the processing speed against the Win version of Lilypond, but at least it runs significantly faster than on my old Linux machine, so it cannot be too bad.
However, just as any other solution based on Docker or other VMs, it's not aimed at the average Windows user, especially if you want to run Frescobaldi or any other GUI based editor, since Windows WSL doesn't support X applications natively.
/Mats
