I’m interviewing for a software dev job currently (it’s in the initial stages). If things work out, I’d absolutely prefer a work laptop with Linux installed (I personally use PopOS but any distro will do), a Mac will be second choice, but I absolutely cannot tolerate Windows, I abhor it, I hate it… (If all computers left on earth have Windows I’d either quit this field or just quit Earth).
Sometimes it’s possible to tell if they use Windows or not, for example, jobs with dotnet/C# are most likely using windows, but not in my case.
Anyways, is it too weird to ask what kind of laptop they provide to their employees? And to also specifically ask for a Linux (or anything but windows) work laptop?
FWIW I get along pretty well with a virtualbox vm running on my employer provided windows machine. Performance is good and virtualbox even supports multiple displays pretty well.
You do need to square things with corporate IT and security though. Some places really lock their systems down. I’d ask about how “developer friendly” their security policies are.
Virtual box is very slow compared to something more native. I prefer KVM on Linux if I can get it and I’m pretty sure Hyper-V is going to be faster even though it is a tremendous pain in the ***
VirtualBox performs just fine for me and I’m not exactly light on how I use it. I have a development environment with multiple IntelliJ instances running, and Oracle database running in Docker, etc. And the desktop integration is much better than Hyper-V. KVM is not an option if the host is Windows.
With VirtualBox I can run full screen with multiple monitors - aside from the Windows Key being caught by Windows it’s nearly complete immersion to the Linux desktop. I can then switch to “window mode” if I need to do anything from Windows. And even in “windowed mode” I still have multiple monitors (it does one window for each).
Raw performance isn’t everything. The user experience here is much better than what the hypervisors provide.