I have a friend thats setting up linux (ubuntu) on his machine. He has a windows installation. I personally use mac as my primary OS, but I’ve had a linux partition on my machine as well, and I’m having a slightly hard time giving him good advice as to what solution he should choose when setting up linux (I don’t even know how I would partition a disk on a windows machine to prep it for dual booting).
My question is quite simple: What are the pros/cons of WSL vs. Dual Booting vs. Virtualbox, both with regards to setup and with regards to usage?
WSL Pros: easy to use and to install Cons: it still runs on top of Windows and some hardware functions are not available. Also, terminal-only
Virtualbox Basically the same as WSL but it could be slower being a layer2 hypervisor
Dual booting Pros: a full-fledged Linux OS Cons: Harder to install and to mantain.
Dual booting Pros: a full-fledged Linux OS Cons: Harder to install and to mantain.
Also, sometimes Windows being an ass and “accidentally” breaking the bootloader.
I advice anyone to have just one OS per drive installed. Keep Windows and Linux separate if possible, or some Windows update may break GRUB.
Then you can wipe out windows when you realize you don’t use it anymore :)
Also, terminal-only
this is not the case anymore. You can run graphical applications.
While they do work, the UX is kinda gimped (knowing Micro$oft - that’s on purpose).
Source: using Rider Snap in Ubuntu in daily work
WSL2 is “fine”. It has some performance issues when accessing files on the windows side of things from sick
On a technical level it’s a Linux VM running containers for Distributions that get some mounts and for WSLg a directx video device.
WSLg also provides an X server, Wayland compositor and a Pulse server so most gui apps “just work”.
Good way to start learning or get a taste for things, and easier than a VM to get started.
WSL: If your friend is a dev and needs Linux cli utilities, use this. Dual Boot: If your friend wants to daily drive Linux, use this. Shrink Windows NTFS partition within Windows then install Linux to blank space. Virtualbox: Testing ground for dual boot, your friend can familiarise themselves with Linux safely using a VM.
This is what I was going to say.
- If they’re a dev WSL is a godsend for development.
- If they are looking to move away from windows, dual boot or live cd/thumb drive are good ways to test things out.
These are three super different things that fill entirely different uses. It’s like asking if you should use a car, a boat, or an airplane. If you just wanna mess around then probably VirtualBox unless you only want terminal stuff to mess around, then you’d want WSL.
If you are going to dual boot and your computer has room for 2 drives. The way I would recommend doing it is to add a second drive for Linux, and disconnect to windows drive from the computer. Do a normal linux install. And then add the windows drive back in. Then you can set one of the drives as the default boot device and if you want to boot to the other just open the Boot options on boot.
This keeps things totally separated and you can even remove one of the drives later if you want to single boot.
Installing Linux after Windows should be fine without disconnecting drives.
The reverse is troublesome. Microsoft’s installer is all too happy to shit on your drives, even the ones you’re not using for installation. But Linux installers are much more friendly to dual-booting and all kinds of complex setups.
