What is the best distro for my business manager?

marbux marbux at gmail.com
Sat Nov 24 09:22:10 UTC 2012


On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 12:28 AM, John J. Boyer
<john.boyer at abilitiessoft.com> wrote:
> A very interesting discussion. Everyone recommends a virtual machine.
> What is the problem with dual-boot? That would be the most stable
> configuration.

Dual-boot is a maddening configuration because of a permutation of
Murphy's Law: What you want to do next seemingly always requires
rebooting the system to access the other OS. So with an inspiration
for something to do on the other system, you sit there and wait, over
and over again.

The huge advantage of VMs is that there is no need to reboot; you have
instant access to both systems with a keyboard shortcut and can do
things like sharing the clipboard, devices, etc., because of
"pass-through" code.  E.g., if I'm in Windows and see some content I
want to use on Linux I can just clip it in Windows, hit a shortcut,
and paste it to an app on Mint. And vice versa. Or I can save it to a
shared partition and open the file on the other system. Shared disk
drives, shared printers, shared USB devices, on and on, all just a
keyboard shortcut away. You can even have each system performing tasks
concurrently and VM software is not limited to running a single VM at
once.

VM's aren't inherently unstable but they can't be any more stable than
the host operating system. Windows instability has been the focus of
our discussion, not the stability of VMs themselves.

The major vulnerability of VMs, in my view, is that they require a
virtual hard drive, which in reality exists as one huge file on the
host machine. If the host operating system is prone to corrupting
files, the VM is in danger. Hence our discussion of which OS should be
running on bare metal and which should be running on the VM.

Best regards,

Paul




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