[GTALUG] VM decisions for school laptop..

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 08:05:19PM -0400, Michael Galea via talk wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> My son is off to university for CS this fall, and will need a laptop. I'm
> looking at purchasing one for him, so he can run Windows and Linux. I'm
> figuring on going the VM route.
> 
> 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.
> 
> A bit of research indicates that the two most popular free VM contenders are
> VMware and Microsoft's Hyper-V.  Can anyone recommend one over the other?
> Are there better choices?

At work I run Debian in virtualbox on windows.  I much prefer it over
vmware and hyperv.

For a lot of stuff the linux on windows feature in Windows 10 covers a
lot of use cases too.  Not X applications though.

> 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?

Well personally I think the only good option says Thinkpad on it.
Getting more than 1TB in a laptop is not cheap.  32GB ram can be done,
although I have found 16 to be plenty so far.  I did 24 for a while
and didn't notice any change (other than adding 50% to windows's
suspend/resume to disk time).

-- 
Len Sorensen