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?

  • @breadsmasherEnglish
    2•2 months ago

    Windows as a daily driver, want to do some development / docker usage based on Linux - WSL. Also you can if I remember correctly only run windows containers on windows as well as linux containers. You cant run windows containers on a linux host

    You want to daily drive Linux but sometimes swap back to windows for some specific purpose (like specific games or applications that proton doesnt work with), Dual Boot

    Only reason I would use virtualbox over WSL is if I need to work with a fully fledged Linux OS. I havent needed to do this since WSL though

    To prep for dual booting, simplest is to have windows installed first then use the graphical installer from Linux distro which lets you select a partition to split, resize and setup GRUB etc. Very easy to do. BACK YOUR SHIT UP THOUGH