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Comment by DeepDuh | Hacker News Reader

About HFS: You seem to dismiss it a bit quickly. Trial versions of 'MacDrive' on Windows have always worked very solidly for me - if I were still using bootcamp I would pay for it.

However the bigger question IMO is: Do we really need native windows nowadays? If we ban windows into VMs and only use OSX + linux natively, HFS is indeed a solid option. The only thing hindering us so far from using windows VM-only was gaming and audio/video rendering software. Audio is very niche and the rest should soon be solved with increasing support for PCIe passthrough.

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HFS hard links don't even work readonly on Linux but are used extensively in Time Machine backups, so there is at least one common use case of HFS partitions that isn't cross platform.

I prefer things vice versa. I know it's very hipster to hate Windows, but if I stick OS X and Linux into VirtualBox, I can then use Samba on Linux and OS X already supports SMB. Now everybody can talk to each other.

> I know it's very hipster to hate Windows

I'm going to raise the level of meta-discussion here and say that it's even more hipster (my subjective assesment) to use that subjective assesment (hipster) of other subjective assesments (hate Windows).

Well, the thing about OSX is that it is heavily reliant on in house media codecs and drivers that I find haven't been virtualized very successfully so far. Furthermore, I find that the (paid) virtual host desktop solutions on OSX are much better in terms of performance and integration than their windows counterparts - probably because of higher demand, possibly also because of architectural reasons.

But maybe you have found a way and you can then prove me wrong: Does iWorks work in your virtual box VM? Does XCode including iOS simulator work well? Is the performance acceptable? How about the iLive suit? How about unity development? How about the clipboard - does it keep its 'PDF snippet' functionality (no rasterization of fonts, original quality images)?

See, there's tons of OSX exclusive software that's quite demanding in terms of media and hardware acceleration, simply because of the OS's highly integrated character. Unless someone can show me a solid OSX-in-a-box I doubt that it's a good experience.

> Does XCode including iOS simulator work well?

Yes.

> Is the performance acceptable?

It is for the above. Not so much for anything demanding.

You're kinda missing my point. If I wanted to work in OS X, I certainly would never virtualize it. If I occasionally need to check a website or see how it would look like on an iPhone, then virtualization is a good option.

What's wrong with Windows in a VM? Linux can share the files using samba as well.

Maybe he plays performance demanding games in his spare time or wants full performance out of Windows only 3d tools and IDEs (Visual Studio)? Just a guess. Only reasons I would want to use Windows touching hardware versus a VM.

One can do GPU passthrough with Xen[1] if hardware allows, but that's a lot of footwork to set up and configure. Performance near native through from reports of those I know that have done it. Ubisoft gave a demonstration a while ago of Crysis running through Xen and GPU passthrough[2].

[1] http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/XenVGAPassthrough

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtmwnx-k2qg

? It's super duper easy to run a Samba server in Linux.

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