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Comment by mintplant | Hacker News Reader

Yep, I do my development almost entirely within a Linux VM on a Windows laptop. Workstation already feels kinda neglected (lack of support for distinguishing between P and E cores is one recent unresolved pain point), so all of this is really putting me on edge.

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Is there a reason not to just install Linux (and dual boot into windows if you need it for some things)?

I suppose if it’s a work laptop they might not be too pleased with this.

Then I would have to reboot all the time to switch back and forth. And hardware acceleration is better on Windows, so I usually have web browsing, music, videos, messaging, etc, running on Windows on one monitor or virtual desktop while my terminal is open in the Linux VM on another. Like another commenter mentioned, power management on Windows is still better, too.

Seems like Linux laptops are generally not known for their great battery life. Would certainly be an issue for many laptop users.

It's a pain in the ass to set up sometimes, but you can pretty much always get better battery life in Linux nowadays. Even with hybrid graphics laptops.

i have never got better battery life on linux with every power savibg tweak under the sun, on system76 laptops. its still awful

a bit off topic, but do you know of any good resources on tuning battery life and CPU fan control for system76 laptop?

If you're on Windows and need a VM, why not use Hyper-V? I haven't touched anything from VMWare in decades, so I'm genuinely curious.

VMWare has the best virtual graphics performance IMHO. Hyper-V or Virtualbox is just painful in comparison. Until graphic vendors support partitioning GPU resources to allow sharing the main GPU to a VM using passthrough, it will likely remain one of the best options for many.

Yep, this is the exact reason. I started on Virtualbox but jumped over to VMWare because the graphics virtualization was too broken under Virtualbox to do testing for web browser development (I was interning at Mozilla at the time).

WSL2 works great for me, you should check it out

Disk performance can be a problem under WSL2, I ended up switching to Workstations after running into this issue: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197

Seems to more of a Defender issue than a WSL one, see https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/8995

After adding exclusions for the fsnotifier-wsl process and and both variants of the WSL distro path my disk performance was improved.

Adding the idea64.exe process also helped since I was trying to run IntelliJ against projects inside WSL.

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