Hacker News Reader

Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

"Installing Linux on most Windows 8 computers is still no easy task."

Windows 8 Professional includes the Hyper-V hypervisor. Many PC's recent enough to have UEFI will have a compatible processor (i3 and later).

For many tasks a virtualized installation probably has adequate performance - contemporary hardware and Hyper-V are pretty powerful relative to the machines of a few tears ago.

Of course, for some, not booting directly to Linux might create a performance concern. For others it is an ideological issue. However, one which is created by the decisions of hardware vendors and market realities, not Microsoft.

View on HN

It's more of an unnecessarily substandard user experience than anything else. The virtualised system is necessarily more complex than the bare system (it is the bare system + another OS + the virtual machine) so when something goes wrong there is that much more of a problem surface. If you intend to use the linux desktop, you are booting into one operating system purely to get through to the next one. That means additional waiting, keypress captures, device sharing, and things you don't really need to worry about.

These things aren't killer issues, sure, but if there exists a product that doesn't involve doing things the hard way then I'm going to avoid doing things the hard way.

At the point one insists on Linux the desktop for an average user, the complexity argument has left the barn. This isn't meant as snark.

Linux lacks a grandmother friendly user support interface. When something goes wrong, a person of average familiarity with Linux is fucked. Arguments about how often operating systems present such problems are for another debate.

The issue of hardware, is just that, an issue of hardware. A lack of systems upon which it is easy to boot Linux is due to the fit between hardware manufacturer's and the market. At least the situation is better than Android on an iPhone.

> At the point one insists on Linux the desktop for an average user, the complexity argument has left the barn. This isn't meant as snark.

Agree, but I'm not sure what you're driving at. I was talking about existing users that want to run Linux as their primary desktop, as they're going to be the market that is affected by this.

I'm saying that people who want to run Linux as their primary desktop are not a market of interest to hardware manufacturer's.

Indeed, I am going so far as to suggest that it may be a market in which hardware manufacturer's are explicitly disinterested due to the potential support costs.

Furthermore, the wide spread expectation that a Linux machine should be less expensive than one with Windows due to the elimination of license fees might make the market even more unattractive to manufacturers.

Supporting Linux is expensive to the point that Red Hat has made a business out of it.

I agree with what you're saying. Still, my point remains that virtualisation is a poor cousin of native OS.

While "virtualization of everything" seemed like a real future few years ago, at my experience of having Ubuntu installed as virtual machine for coworkers that use windows (but have to do python on linux) -- it completely suck. We ended out either having separate machines or just finding alternatives to windows-apps for those people.

I had a similar experience, but working the other way round - I was using Ubuntu as the base system, and a Windows VM for MS Office stuff. It was a real pain, TBH: navigating in and out of the VM was clunky, moving files around, etc.

In case anyone's wondering, I did try using Wine, but that was even worse, I'd get weird screen update problems, things would go black, etc. Libre/Open Office wasn't an option either, the client was 100% MS including Project, and compatibility was (and is) a serious issue.

I tried this at my office in August. When hosting the VM on my (somewhat old) laptop, raw performance was the issue -- there wasn't enough RAM and CPU to run both Win7 and the VM concurrently, and as an intern I couldn't justify the laptop upgrade.

When moving the VM to a server, the raw performance issues went away, but network lag became a pretty serious obstacle when using the GUI. In the end, I ended up just SSHing into the VM, and mounting part of its filesystem using Samba.

(And assuming that I had been able to get a working graphical environment, it's still a very low standard of "working." There are dozens of little annoyances when you're nesting a completely separate window manager inside your current window manager.)

I've gone the other way, running Windows 7 as a virtual machine on Ubuntu since performance is really needed for Linux, Windows is just for Office, VS and lower performance databases, etc. Plus I can shut the VM down and use the entire CPU/DRAM/IO for pytables, or whatever.

You need decent hardware, I've got a beefy i7 laptop with lots of DRAM and will be adding an additional SSD. You can do better with tower or remoting elsewhere, but it's nice to have the whole environment along sometimes.

Many people use laptops that don't have enough power to handle two OSes. I just switched from an i5+SSD Thinkpad to a Xeon-based workstation and the difference while running the same VMs as before is huge.

Hyper-V doesn't support modern resolutions (not even 1080p). I've been using Virtualbox, which has its own issues (the client machines can't always see the virtual monitor's resolution), but has been adequate.

For a Hyper-V Windows client, you should be using Remote Desktop. The Hyper-V desktop client is really designed for simple installtion & management. For other OSs, I'd imagine installing a native client (ssh/X) on the host would be a better experience.

I haven't tried it, but I would be very surprised if playing 1080p video over ssh/X was watchable. My initial plan was just to use Windows 8 for games and do all my other computing inside an Ubuntu VM, but the Windows 8 environment (other than for command line stuff) is really growing on me. Currently I only use the VM for banking and shopping, which I'm still (perhaps unjustly) afraid to use a Windows machine for.

> Currently I only use the VM for banking and shopping, which I'm still (perhaps unjustly) afraid to use a Windows machine for.

Definitely unjustly.

Windows 8 has far better security mitigations than a base Ubuntu install.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com