I have a friend thats setting up linux (ubuntu) on his machine. He has a windows installation. I personally use mac as my primary OS, but I’ve had a linux partition on my machine as well, and I’m having a slightly hard time giving him good advice as to what solution he should choose when setting up linux (I don’t even know how I would partition a disk on a windows machine to prep it for dual booting).

My question is quite simple: What are the pros/cons of WSL vs. Dual Booting vs. Virtualbox, both with regards to setup and with regards to usage?

  • NaN
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    16 days ago

    Most people are running Windows OEM licenses that don’t transfer to VMs. A retail license you can move around.

      • NaN
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        26 days ago

        It has activation issues as the license is tied to hardware. If you have a retail license tied to your account it will prompt you to transfer from another machine, OEM does not. Nowadays people don’t even get a key, although it can be extracted from the firmware.

        • Pika
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          5 days ago

          a retail license doesn’t even prompt that, just sign in with your MS account and bobs your uncle, that’s how I manage all of my VM stuff I just sign into my primary Microsoft account and it automatically activates, I’m sure one of these days it’s going to hit a Hidden activation limit but I’m not really sure how Windows works with that, I don’t change vm’s all that often.

          My main bottleneck for swapping fully off of dual booting is the annoyance when it comes to trying to configure GPU pass through with KVM, I would definitely be using that virtual machine for gaming on the few games that no longer work using proton but like it’s such a pain in the butt to set up, that and for the duration of me having to transfer the system I basically need to have twice the amount of disk space because I need to clone that data over to an image before being able to free up the partitions