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?

  • @jacksilver
    3•2 months ago

    This is what I was going to say.

    • If they’re a dev WSL is a godsend for development.
    • If they are looking to move away from windows, dual boot or live cd/thumb drive are good ways to test things out.
    • JackbyDevEnglish
      1•2 months ago

      I never got around to using WSL for dev stuff, sadly. I was stuck on Windows 7 until December 2019 and have had a Mac for work ever since. For personal stuff I just use the MSYS environment included in Git for windows (it has bash and a few other things). If I ever got a Windows laptop for work again I’d probably put the time in to learn WSL.