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

[Stephen Wiley via TriLUG]

OSX has an X server and very nice VTE. If your company doesn't go out of
its way to install malware like McAffe and Tanium it will probably
perform better too. I would go with that.

My issue in that kind of setup has always been that you have to use
Outlook and Safari for all of the corporate infrastructure which means
tolerating the borderline unusable non-free WM. Everything else you do
works in tmux. I don't think there's really any way around that in most
contemporary corporate environments. It's just one of those large scale
coordination problems you run into in places like that.

IMO these days they're almost paying you more to absorb stupidity like
that then to produce technical solutions.

-- Stephen

On Sat, Jan 03, 2026 at 07:05:10PM -0500, 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.
> 
> -- 
> Ed Blackman
> 
> -- 
> This message was sent to: Stephen Wiley <swiley at swiley.net>
> To unsubscribe, send a blank message to trilug-leave at trilug.org from that address.
> TriLUG mailing list : https://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
> Unsubscribe or edit options on the web	: https://www.trilug.org/mailman/options/trilug/swiley%40swiley.net
> Welcome to TriLUG: https://trilug.org/welcome