Ask HN: How viable is it to run Linux in a VM, on a laptop?

[rerx]

For the past five years I have been doing most of my work from a Thinkpad X220 running Kubuntu Linux. However, some aspects of the free software environment start to annoy me. Now I am really tempted by this year's Thinkpad X1 Yoga with an OLED screen. I could just use Windows for much of the time (OneNote with that stylus sounds great!), but I would want to have a full fledged Linux around for hard work like programming and data analysis. Dual booting is not really an option if I want to use Windows for more than games. It has crossed my mind that I could just run VMWare or VirtualBox with a Linux distribution of my choice on a second virtual desktop. Does anybody of you run such a setup on a daily basis? Is it "fast enough"? How does it affect battery life? Will interoperation via shared folders be "smooth enough"?

The alternative would of course be to get a Mac. But I am extremely partial to the Thinkpad keyboard and trackpoint and Apple's most recent design decisions have made the Macbook Pro less attractive to me.

[ake1]

i'm running debian in vmware workstation player on windows 7 at work as i'm unable to run it as the os on the laptop* (thinkpad t440s). it's not great but it's a whole lot better than not doing it.

the performance penalty for gui applications is fairly obvious (sluggish) but most of the things i'm running wouldn't work (containers etc.) or are actually faster (eg. rm -rf node_modules && npm install). being a couple of years old the battery is pretty much non-existant either way so i can't comment on that and i'm not using shared folders either (not using the host os at all).

* not because it's not possible, org policy.

[rerx → ake1]

Very comforting to hear that non-GUI performance is so good!

[ry4n413]

i run my desktop (windows 10 pro) and hyper-v (with linux vm). Realize you are looking at for laptop, so can't speak to battery life. But, I use WinSCP (so I can access folders) and ConEmu to SSH (to access bash) into VM and don't notice any performance issues.

have you checked out Bash on Ubuntu on Windows?

[rerx → ry4n413]

I don't believe Ubuntu on Windows is fully there already, but I have not tried it out yet.

In addition to Bash I would like to have, for instance, a full fledged graphical Emacs, the Dolphin file browser and the Konsole terminal emulator. So a headless VM would not really be enough -- does Hyper-V work well with a graphical desktop?

[ry4n413 → rerx]

have you checked https://sourceforge.net/projects/xming/

unless you have laptop larger than 1920x1080 screen reso, then I can't think of any problem (hyper-v doesn't allow you to change reso larger to than 1920x1080).

I don't think you can copy clipboard content out of the box with hyper-v, but I think fix just involves installing package.

https://i.imgsafe.org/639321f1ea.png ^pic of my gui on windows

[rerx → ry4n413]

That's really interesting -- I will keep that in mind as an alternative possibility!

Although the screen resolution would be a problem with the X1 Yoga.

[davelnewton]

Totally viable? People do it all the time.