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Comment by 3dFlatLander | Hacker News Reader

My fear (hope?) would be VirtualBox. Aside from Java, I use that the most.

If you are using only the open source edition of VirtualBox, kvm can do a reasonable job. I run Windows 7 on it in headless mode with VNC - primarily I need it for the presentations, everything else I do from Linux.

My perception was that it is a bit lighter than VirtualBox, and it worked very well so far for me. VBox had a couple of glitches when I was using it before.

...and if your host system is mac or windows? :)

...Then you install Linux and the problem becomes identical to the one we have just solved ;-)

I am saying this semi-seriously: have been using Linux as my primary OS on the desktop for the past 9 years, with half-year deflections to MacOS X and, lately, to Windows 7. But the fluxbox with 0-pixel borders and "focus follows mouse" had always dragged me back. Also in my latest experience, the perception was that Win7 on bare metal ran somewhat slower than Win7 under kvm.

With Windows, I used coLinux (http://colinux.org/). The MacOS X that I used was PPC-based, it was circa 2005, so no reasonable experience there - so if you're for freebies, I suppose VirtualBox is the only option (I just found this: http://www.kju-app.org/ - but since I don't have Mac, no way to see what it does).

laughs -- As for myself, my (new) laptop dual boots currently, but linux has been a real drain on battery life as the current crop of sandy bridge laptops include two video cards, and I haven't figured out how to turn off the unused one yet.

Should be an option in the bios to turn off switchable graphics (like optimus). If you're lucky, your laptop also has a chip to switch to discrete or integrated only.

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