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?
WSL Pros: easy to use and to install Cons: it still runs on top of Windows and some hardware functions are not available. Also, terminal-only
Virtualbox Basically the same as WSL but it could be slower being a layer2 hypervisor
Dual booting Pros: a full-fledged Linux OS Cons: Harder to install and to mantain.
this is not the case anymore. You can run graphical applications.
While they do work, the UX is kinda gimped (knowing Micro$oft - that’s on purpose).
Source: using Rider Snap in Ubuntu in daily work
Also, sometimes Windows being an ass and “accidentally” breaking the bootloader.
I advice anyone to have just one OS per drive installed. Keep Windows and Linux separate if possible, or some Windows update may break GRUB.
Then you can wipe out windows when you realize you don’t use it anymore :)