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

[via TriLUG]

Maybe installing a second drive and installing your linux on that?  A 
usb drive would work, but who wants that to be poking out the side of 
their laptop when carrying it around.

Ideally, if you can install a second drive inside of the machine and put 
your linux on that, then that is what I would do.  But corporate might 
not like that.

However, a flash drive would definitely work.  There are some that don't 
stick out that much.  Especially some that use a tf card.  That would be 
slower.... but you can probably get it to load the system files into a 
ram disk, which would help that problem.

Derek


On 1/3/26 7:05 PM, Ed Blackman via TriLUG 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.
>