
Virtualization in Windows - ingve
https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/virtualization-in-windows
======
mdip
Sadly, I came to that conclusion last year for different reasons.

I've got an excellent ThinkPad laptop and do development mostly in .NET[0].
When I received it, it was loaded with Windows, and since the rest of the team
ran Windows, I figured I'd keep it, enable Hyper-V and run openSUSE virtually.
This was a couple of years ago and lasted about two months before I reversed
it.

Linux under Hyper-V was unbearable if I was in anything other than a pure text
terminal. Graphics performance was bad to the point of being unusable -- I
ended up installing a commercial remote control tool which "helped" but came
with so many additional trade-offs that it wasn't worth it. I briefly
experimented with a couple ofother virtualization apps but had similar
results.

So I switched it around; I installed OpenSUSE, configured everything with
libvirt/vmm (unfortunately, the GUI didn't provide a lot of the necessary
settings to get things performing well). At the end of the day, it probably
took me a solid two very late evenings to get everything reasonable[1]. With
just the Spice/guest drivers (no video card redirection), I have reasonably
reliable clipboard sharing, host/guest file sharing[2], not-really-
accelerated-but-very-usable video[3], and Visual Studio with ReSharper runs
(estimated) 20% slower than it did on bare metal Windows 10 Pro. It's not
going to play games, but it's usable for Office/Outlook/Visual Studio (the
latter being all that I have installed there).

[0] At the time, a lot of our projects were IIS hosted (on-prem/cloud); within
a year we were 95% Linux deployed. I decided about 3 years ago that my
knowledge of Windows was so thorough that it was bordering on boring. I wanted
to feel that way when using a "typical" Linux distribution, so I figured
immersion was the best approach and ended up reloading all but one (nearly
disused) machine at home.

[1] There are a ton of guides on how to get Windows 10 working well, however,
I run Tumbleweed which generally ships with bleeding-edge everything. Finding
guides that were relevant to the latest versions and included explanations as
to "why" settings choices were made were few and far between; I ended up just
immersing myself in the actual docs.

[2] Why is this so painful?

[3] I can play web video at just about 30FPS; audio works similarly well with
some crackling. I eliminated the audio devices after install, though -- I
limit my Windows use to things that I can only do in Visual Studio and I don't
need sound for any of that.

