On Wed, 2018-04-11 at 20:05 -0400, Michael Galea via talk wrote: > Hi All, > > My son is off to university for CS this fall, and will need a > laptop. > I'm looking at purchasing one for him, so he can run Windows and > Linux. > I'm figuring on going the VM route.
My kids run Linux at home and Windows at school. My first will be headed off to University this fall as well. I asked and the school does support using Linux so she will likely choose that as her main OS. > He can use both OS's but is probably more familiar with Win, and his > courses mandate a number of windows only tools. I'm heading in the > direction of booting Win10 and using a VM running Debian. If the courses require Windows it is likely best to run Windows. Though the technically adept can run Linux with a VM machine with Windows. (Assuming they do not need direct hardware access for gaming). Linux as a host OS takes up less memory than Windows as a host OS so that is the route I chose. > A bit of research indicates that the two most popular free VM > contenders are VMware and Microsoft's Hyper-V. Can anyone recommend > one over the other? Are there better choices? VirtualBox is another solid choice. > As per laptop specs, I am figuring on getting something with a late > model Intel i7, 32 GB RAM, and 1-2TB storage. I figure many laptops > must meet this spec. Is there anything else I should be looking for? That sounds like a heavy brick of a machine. To be honest 32GB of ram is overkill in most cases. I might consider getting a USB attached HD for long term storage and a 512GB SSD for the laptop. That would be a good mix of performance with the ability to save files for long term use. --- Talk Mailing List [email protected] https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
