[Tutor] OT: Recommendations for a Linux distribution to dual-boot with Win7-64 bit

[Wolfgang Maier]

On 29.06.2016 01:16, boB Stepp wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 10:48 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
>> What about running Win7 in a virtual machine?
>
> What type of performance hit will I take when running CPU intensive
> processes?  I don't yet have any real experiences with running virtual
> machines.  If this is acceptable, I am willing to forget the dual-boot
> idea and just jump in the deep end with Linux.  The only thing I would
> hate is reinstalling Win7 into the virtual environment and the endless
> sequence of updating ...
>


Of course, there is a performance hit when using a virtual machine. 
After all, you have a running Windows or Linux, whichever way round you 
do things, from which you start it.
How much that matters, depends strongly on what you want to do though. 
After all, you could do performance-critical stuff in your real OS 
instead of inside the VW.
I still like dual-boot better for home use. If you have multiple users 
or even just guests they might not all be used to having to start a VM 
to use Windows.


>>
>> Otherwise, I like:
>>
>> Linux Mint. Good software repositories, more conservative than Ubuntu,
>> not as stick-in-the-mud as Debian. Based on Debian/Ubuntu so the quality
>> is good, mostly aimed at non-hard core Linux geeks.
>
> Alan obviously likes this distro.  And my teacher wife at the
> beginning of this summer break switched several of her class PCs to
> Mint.  Be nice to be writing software for the same environment, so
> this might be a positive here.
>