Best Vm For Windows On Linux
Roxine Denison
It can be an inundating experience, especially for people coming from proprietary operating systems like Windows. Linux distributions, thanks to their open source nature, offer a lot more access than their closed source cousins, which makes the transition particularly difficult for many users.
The Dell XPS 13 7390 is one of the best Linux laptops currently available. The laptop also has a number of customizations you can opt for including additional RAM, larger storage capacity and even a 4K InfinityEdge touchscreen. The Ubuntu edition is a beautiful machine as it comes with a platinum silver finish with a black carbon fiber palm rest.
The experimental version (current V23) is designed for "non-production environments". In other words it's better for personal use rather than anything critical. The latest experimental build is visually very rich with a "flow design" and added widgets so closely resembles Windows 11.
Deepin uses a first-boot configurator app to help you tweak the look and feel of your installation by changing icons, enabling window effects and more. These are classified into two broad categories and you can use either depending on the number of available resources on your computer.
On lower-end machines, you can run the installation in Efficient mode to make the best use of the limited resources, while on newer ones you can use the Fashion mode to turn up the bling. The amount of customizations in DDE are quite diverse and extend from the main desktop area to the notification management.
The other custom Deepin app that deserves a special mention is the App Store. It makes it fairly easy to discover and install news apps, which will be appreciated by new users not familiar to the Linux app ecosystem. Also, listed besides the usual categories of apps is the Uninstall section that can help you get rid of any installed apps using a more familiar parlance.
This isn't all that's divine about this OS. It has made a name for itself for crafting a very usable and aesthetically pleasing desktop distro. Everything from its pre-installed apps to its home brewed desktop is designed to give a comforting experience to users new to Linux.
Its custom-built Pantheon desktop, is a pleasing aesthetic take on the classical desktop metaphor. One of its distinguishing features is the picture-in-picture mode that enables you to select an area of a window or the desktop, and then pops it out. This pop-out is movable, resizable, always-on-top, and can move across workspaces
The distro also has an onboarding app to help new users set up their installation. elementary OS also uses its own App Center. The latest version emphasizes app screenshots, as well as providing more information about the developer and how actively packages are maintained. Installation is via Flatpaks so it's very easy to toggle automatic app updates too. It takes a similar approach to system settings with its custom app that exposes the bare essentials instead of throwing an endless stream of toggles and switches.
Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu. It's specifically designed to work "out of the box". The two main flavors use the MATE (pictured) and Cinammon desktop environments. The layout is familiar for Windows users with a taskbar and configurable menus on the bottom.
This distro emphasizes compatibility with restricted/proprietary formats. Out of the box it can edit Microsoft Office documents via the LibreOffice suite. With one click of your mouse you can also "Install Multimedia Codecs" to play all kinds of audio/video files.
You can also use the Software Manager to install more programs. Linux Mint has its own repositories but can also access Ubuntu's. There are around 30,000 packages available overall, so it's likely you can find a good equivalent to Windows apps.
At first glance, Zorin OS comes off as just another Ubuntu-based distro. However, what makes it unique is the home-brewed Zorin Appearance app that tweaks the desktop environment to make it resemble Windows in both form and function.
The GUI is Windows-like with a menu that opens from the bottom left of the desktop and a task bar. You can use the launch menu to install "Windows App Support" to run your favorite Windows apps through the 'Wine' compatibility player of 'PlayonLinux'. The preinstalled LibreOffice suite can also open Microsoft Office documents.
Ubuntu is one of the most popular flavors of Linux and is strongly recommended for Linux newbies, as it's extremely accessible. That's why we've already featured two variations of Ubuntu in this guide, but it's worth considering the main Ubuntu release itself.
New versions of Ubuntu are released every six months, and every other year the developer Canonical releases an LTS (long term support) version of Ubuntu. These guarantee five years of security and general maintenance updates, so you can carry on using your machine without the hassle of running a full upgrade every few months. Standard releases are supported for one year only.
The good news is that Ubuntu is available in a variety of flavors. The "Lubuntu" OS uses the LXQt desktop environment. This will feel comfortable for Windows users, as you can access the menu and minimize windows just as before. Both the desktop and apps that come bundled with Lubuntu are designed to be lightweight, making it perfect for older machines.
As of version 23.04, Ubuntu now officially supports the 'Cinnamon' desktop (pictured). This has a similar look and feel to Windows but uses much richer graphics. Naturally, you'll need a more recent PC to make use of all its features.
Ubuntu has also become increasingly integral with cloud computing services, making it not just a good distro for easing beginners into Linux, but also one for those looking to develop their long-term business IT skills.
We evaluated the desktop environment based on the visuals, functionality, and customizability. We also checked out the online forums to see if there was an active community that could help with doubts.
To get the most out of it, you would still be looking at running bash or powershell in addition as well, but Anisble might be a technology that might simplify the management and automation of your diverse set of infrastructure. Sounds like a fun problem to have. Good luck.
To echo everyone else, I would first learn Powershell and Bash, you might be surprised at how far that will get you on both platforms, especially with Powershell. If you find you outgrow Bash, then maybe consider adding Powershell Core to Linux since you will already know the language by that point.
I would invest my time into powershell. Powershell is really the only option one should be using on windows these days. And MS has expanded it so It can be installed onto linux and manage linux devices also.
If you are trying to automate tasks, look into a tool for this not a specific language. Both OSes work differently so you would have to edit your file for each system anyways. I know you can do a lot with PDQ deploy for Windows.
I've a laptop with triple boot, Yosemite, Windows 8.1, CentOS 7, and need a partition for sharing files between the 3 os's, i've been using exFAT, as it is supported by OSX & Windows but had some issues with linux and after try to mount it on linux, osx didn't recognize it, and i was unable to mount it, then just windows recognized it and after 1 day of using it got corrupted, i had to get my data back with TesDrive.
HFS+: Using MacDrive Pro in windows to have read/write access to mac partition, i guess there's a way to allow linux support for hfs+. Heard some good & bad things about MacDrive but still not so sure...
UPDATE 1:After more research i've found Tuxera NTFS for mac, seems to be nice, but... how good is it in real life? does it offer real NTFS full support as it says?, great Stability? Speed? Journaling?Is it worth for the price?
Cloud storage would be ideal for some use-cases, but sketchy on privacy/security without additional work, and not necessarily suitable for use cases involving a large amount of data. (I've worked around security/privacy issues with transparent per-file encryption, and use this in parallel with the solution I've outlined below, for different use cases.)
Years ago when I got fed up with the data corruption using NTFS-3G, I started using a small VM running Windows 2000, and shared an NTFS volume "natively" to the host OS via CIFS. Performance can't compare to directly attached storage, but I finally got to say goodbye to data corruption and the distrust and headaches it caused. NTFS formatted from Windows 2000, worked flawlessly and interchangeably with more modern versions of Windows, including switching back and forth between Windows 2000 in a VM, and Windows Vista (at the time).
But still, NTFS just wasn't robust enough for reliably storing massive amounts of data over long periods of time, even if in a mirrored configuration (and especially in a RAID5 configuration). Mainly due to bitrot and lack of checksumming. Granted, it was the best thing around for a long time, but not any more.
Now, the only "cross-platform" file system I use is ZFS, presented via CIFS by Linux running in a VM. (I'm also increasingly using BTRFS which recently seems to have crossed some threshold of stability for my use cases. For a long time I only used it experimentally and it often let me down.)
I tried ZFS for Mac a while back and it was too unstable and outdated. Maybe it's fine now, but my VM solution is flawless. And like I said, I'm increasingly using BTRFS anyway, which is a better match in many ways for my requirements (the first and foremost of which is rock-solid reliability - which ZFS has always provided).
I triple-boot my Macs, and when I'm not running Linux natively, I run the same native Linux installation in a VM. Linux is perfectly happy alternating between running in a VM with guest additions, and natively. I'm almost always running a Linux VM for "native" ZFS or BTRFS volume access via CIFS, when not running it natively.
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