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Comment by m_fayer | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, and I hate it.

I have a beloved 2015 MBP that I'm trying to keep alive, but it's becoming a little underpowered and it's not upgradeable. New MBPs are a non-starter with the port and keyboard situation and my coworkers all hate them. Then I have a maxed out XPS 13 which is a very nice and capable machine that suits me completely, except that it has a malicious OS that I have to constantly fight. And Linux doesn't support a lot of the tools I need.

So..... what's the solution here?

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> "Then I have a maxed out XPS 13 which is a very nice and capable machine that suits me completely, except that it has a malicious OS that I have to constantly fight. And Linux doesn't support a lot of the tools I need.

So..... what's the solution here?"

The solution is sitting in your hands. That XPS 13 can run Ubuntu (and probably Debian, Arch/Antergos, or any other major distro) flawlessly since Dell ships a version with Ubuntu preinstalled. Set it up to dual boot with Windows, and use VirtualBox's raw hard disk access feature to set up a Windows guest under Linux using the Windows partition as the VM's boot drive.

That way, you can slowly wean yourself off of Windows; use the VM for your Windows-only tasks with the option of booting natively into Windows for anything strictly hardware dependent, until you have replaced your Windows workflow with Linux. Even if you find you can't 100% escape Windows, at least you're not living in it so you're not being spied on all day.

> set up a Windows guest under Linux using the Windows partition as the VM's boot drive.

> with the option of booting natively into Windows for anything strictly hardware dependent

IIRC, years ago, when Windows 7 was the latest Windows, this couldn't be done. Windows used to take offense if the hardware it was running on changed significantly from boot to boot. Has that changed with Windows 10?

It's gotten better both with changes in Windows itself and with improvements in virtualization. VirtualBox allows you to use different hypervisors so you can get closer to native hardware access in a VM. It works best when the guest is Linux but it also works well with Windows and recently, macOS. You can even do GPU passthrough for better Windows gaming on a Linux host.

With a separate, dedicated GPU is my understanding, which is a deal-breaker.

I've recently moved to Mint with Win7 in a vm and its lack of GPU and DirectX support is not really workable. Basic apps are fine.

> "With a separate, dedicated GPU"

Well, yes, if you want to do any significant amount of gaming on a computer, you'd want a dedicated GPU. If integrated GPUs meet your demands for gaming, you're better of with native Linux games and Wine for Windows casual games.

> "I've recently moved to Mint with Win7 in a vm and its lack of GPU and DirectX support is not really workable."

It sounds like you're better served by dual-booting then. Running a VM isn't a solution for everyone, just another option for some.

use linux for everything that you can use it for and then just run windows in a vm when you need it for certain software.

I started off in a dual boot situation, and i can't even remember the last time i went into my windows partition. It has to be less than 5 times in the past 3 years.

Games are what would prevent a lot of people. GPU support in a vm (at least VirtualBox) is still abysmal.

I think utilizing a firewall at the router level would be one way to deal with the problem, but it will take time to determine and implement the appropriate rules (a popular choice on HN is the EdgeRouter Lite3 from Ubiquiti).

There may be Linux equivalents of the tools you use, but it would be difficult to say without you naming these tools specifically.

> I have a beloved 2015 MBP that I'm trying to keep alive, but it's becoming a little underpowered

The new 2017 models don't have much more horsepower. They just have a worse keyboard and a touch strip.

What are the tools you need that work in both Mac and Windows but not Linux?

Running MacOS on virtualbox on top of Windows works ok. There are a lots of tutorials on the web that shows you how to do that. It does violate Apple's SW license.

It is very fun to play with a full screen MacOS on a touch screen enable Laptop.

My 3 monitors (which have different DPIs than the monitor that comes with my linux laptop). Trying to do this with the tools Ubuntu provides doesn't work. Ubuntu's GUI doesn't scale well, and I can't find a setup that does.

I just want this to work, but it doesn't. This was a Dell laptop that came preinstalled with Ubuntu, too.

Xamarin, Adobe stuff. And I've found a Windows VM in a Linux host to be passable, though suboptimal. Especially because you only run it sporadically, so even though it's a VM you still have to deal with its compulsive and compulsory updating, restarting, and whatever else it does that keeps it busy for 20 minutes when it hasn't been started in a month.

Also Linux multi-screen/multi-DPI support is still bad.

Use a windows vm for the tools that are not available on linux.

Hackintosh

This would effectively just be trading one fight for another.

Not really. If you can live with the same OS X you installed first, allowing only fix updates, you can be totally fine on XPS 13/15 (given you have Broadcom WiFi). Everything else works like on real MacBook. The same holds for most Zenbooks (those without NVidia).

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