[GTALUG] VM decisions for school laptop..

Lennart Sorensen lsorense at csclub.uwaterloo.ca
Thu Apr 12 15:52:26 EDT 2018


On Thu, Apr 12, 2018 at 01:46:01PM -0400, Michael Galea via talk wrote:
> I imagine he will want to run the Linux instance in the background so he can
> get access to a personal git server.
> 
> The course he is taken is in game design and it is mixed Windows/Linux, so
> what he actually uses the Linux for will be mandated by the school.
> I myself would push him completely to Linux but for:
> 1) Some game design systems have sole support or better support under
> Windows (according to him),
> 2) Windows seems to be his preferred development target,
> 3) He plays a lot (too many really) games on Windows.
> 
> Well, he did come to my work to pick up some professional development
> working in C on Linux, so he's not inexperienced.  He can still be turned
> from the dark side.
> 
> We have 5 dedicated Linux machines in the home, 3 are always on. (I am not
> counting the multitude of tablets and embedded Linux devices, only things I
> upgrade on a regular basis).
> We have one Windows machine is entirely dedicated to games, but runs Chrome,
> Thunderbird, Libreoffice and the Gimp instead of whatever Microsoft runs). I
> would ditch Windows 10 if Wine was good enough.
> 
> And there is my Son's Windows machine, whatever is on that (shudders).
> 
> Good point, but I suspect that the laptop should be meaty enough to play the
> things he develops on it.  He uses unity and recommendations for building a
> dev machine range from 8-32 GB.
> 
> He can always rsync from the residence to the (family) home for backup.
> 
> Thanks to all the subsequent commenters!  Summarizing:
> 1) Don't forget VirtualBox, it works well. Some say try Hyper-V since it is
> native. But then he would need Windows Professional, hmmm.
> 2) Make sure the processor support Intel's VT-x for 64 bit development.
> 3) Consider an SSD.
> 4) Some say 8GB memory is enough, some favour 32GB. The university
> recommends 8GB at minimum.
> 5) It was pointed out has Microsoft has "Linux subsystem for Windows", but
> its command line only.

Well if you are doing unity development and 3D games, that something
like a Thinkpad P51 might be what to look at.  I have have a W530
myself at home (the 5 year old predecessor to it) and a W541 at work.
(They went W530, W540 (and W541 with a fixed trackpoint), P50 and P51).
I helped a friend get a P50 for development work last year and she likes
it a lot.  They max out at 64GB ram, so 32GB is trivial for those, and
they can fit two 1TB disks if you really need it, or a mix of disk and
SSD (which is how I run mine which has 1TB disk and 1TB SSD).

-- 
Len Sorensen


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