[GTALUG] VM decisions for school laptop..

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Michael Galea via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

The following is an idiosycratic reaction to your question.  Not
exactly an answer and not exactly reliable.

| He can use both OS's but is probably more familiar with Win, and his courses
| mandate a number of windows only tools. I'm heading in the direction of
| booting Win10 and using a VM running Debian.

I'm pretty lazy.  If I were your son, I'd use just one OS until there
was a very good reason to run the other.  And it would almost never
come up.

Do you have a good example of why he would bother firing up Linux?

You missed your chance to brainwash him: you had to start earlier.  I
succeeded with my kids :-)

My (adult) kids do boot to Windows for two things: games and playing
back protected streaming content (on a dedicated HDTV).  We also boot to
Windows to run tax preparation software.

Having two OSes as "home" is kind of schizophrenic.  It requires
developing twice the skills and experiencing twice the annoying
puzzles.  It may not be a good use of a student's time.

It's also best to have the same OS as your associates: sharing
documents and expertise.  Libreoffice is almost good enough as an MS
Office clone.

| As per laptop specs, I am figuring on getting something with a late model
| Intel i7, 32 GB RAM, and 1-2TB storage. I figure many laptops must meet this
| spec.  Is there anything else I should be looking for?

I now think that an ultrabook is better for students: easy to carry,
long battery life.  256G of SSD and 8G of RAM is fine now, I think.  I
love having a great screen.

An external drive left at home/residence may be a great way to keep
archives safe.

But kids these days actually may be shedding notebooks for phones.  So
maybe a stays-at-home beefy "gaming" notebook might be better.  And
archives are for the cloud (scares me on a couple of levels).

Then again, in some crowds, cool kids have some kind of MacBook.  It
has UNIX underneath but most folks never look.