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Comment by akiselev | Hacker News Reader

Dual booting/VMs might not be practical or worth the effort if you're a gamer or work in one of these fields: mechanical/electrical engineering, firmware, lab or factory automation, architecture, etc.

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I work in a field related to mechanical, electrical engineering and firmware, and I not only think it’s definitely worth the effort to dual boot (I only use Windows for SolidWorks and some other instrumentation programs), I think it’s completely necessary for the more firmware-y parts of my job. Setting up an embedded firmware development environment where you have a decent level of control (so vendor-supplied IDEs are out) is about as annoying as setting up dual boot in the first place, with the obvious benefit that you get a proper UNIX-like system which in my experience increases my productivity. Also using a tiling WM is kind of a must for me when programming and cross-referencing various documents.

Edit: the part about how annoying it is to set up an embedded dev environment may not be true anymore with Windows 10’s WSL (I haven’t tried it)

To each his own - I work in web development but use Altium, Solidworks, Xilinx, and some esoteric embedded compilers that are Windows only for hardware side projects and some Linux infrastructure on k8s clusters for trading. All of my hardware including laptops is powerful enough that I just choose the base OS depending on the context and run VMs to provide any apps I need from other operating systems. Usually the base is Mac OS X for work to avoid deviating from the designers, Windows on personal machines because virtualized 3D still sucks on a per app basis, and Linux on headless machines at home and servers. The context switch is simply too costly for my workflow, especially since I don't always do a good job of firewalling my work from my personal machines.

WSL is great although I often prefer to SSH into a VM or run a docker container (in a VM). There are still some lingering performance problems with filesystems that they haven't solved yet though (partially solved by using VMWare for my own VMs).

I guess the only limiting factor in dual booting would be a lack of skill to set up dual boot. It's quite intimidating at first. I have been dual-booting for ~8 years and I have had my fair share of blunders but nowadays setting up a dual boot pc is very easy especially for the tech savvy (people who are running a k8 cluster) people. I cannot even recall if there was any time where I could restore atleast windows part of the os.

I don't think it was setting up the dual boot that GP was saying was impractical, more having to constantly reboot to switch back & forth between OSes.

I don't think it's just a skill thing; multibooting is more surface for "interesting" bugs and annoyances as you force interactions between systems that weren't designed to work together. Sure, you might know how to fix Windows overwriting the bootloader for the nth time, but it's still a hassle. Yes, you know how to get the UEFI settings the way you want them, but if you were single-booting the system would have done it for you. I get that it's not that bad once you're used to it, but there is a cost to these things.

It starts with messed up clocks and ends up with a bricked SecureBoot.

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