[TriLUG] If you had to choose: Windows vs Mac for Linux graphical VM

[Mauricio Tavares via TriLUG]

On Sat, Jan 3, 2026 at 9:38 PM Ed Blackman via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:
>
> My company is forcing me to give up my Linux development laptop for either a Windows 11 or Mac laptop.  I don't want to give up my Linux development environment, so I'm trying to figure out which would allow me to run a full screen Linux graphical desktop (presumably as a VM?) and ignore the underlying OS as much as possible.  But the last time I used Windows it was Windows 7, and I've never used a Mac, so I don't know what's possible currently.
>
> I'll need to use the underlying OS to turn my VPN on and off, and maybe a couple of other functions, but I'm explicitly not interested in switching to using WSL2 or the Mac shell environment within a mostly Windows or Mac environment.
>
> I don't do anything requiring a GPU: I run terminal vim to write Python and Go code and run Firefox.  If it matters, I'd strongly prefer to run Debian trixie with XFCE or LXQt.
>
> Please let me know if you do something similar and can tell me about Windows or Mac, especially if you have experience with both.
>
      Mac is is Unix-based but ARM. If you need to run an Intel (X64)
CPU vm, it will be slow. And they are getting rid of their Rosetta2
Intel emulation sometime in the future, so you will be relying on
QEMU. Otherwise, there are ARM Linux distros including specifically
for the Mac CPU. In fact, I think i was running a debian install.

      Windows laptop can be x64. AFAIK, virtualbox is still an option
for hypervisor, but Microsoft also has their own.

      Both now come with AI whether you like or not. Windows has more
spyware such as recall, which you really cannot turn off.

I see more developers running a corporate-paid Macbook laptop than Windows.

I am one single data point

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> Ed Blackman
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