At 09:56 AM 12/14/2012, Rick Moen wrote:
Anyway, I _still_ continue to think that dual-booting is generally a solution to the wrong problem, and that running alternative OSes (such as MS-Windows ;-> ) in a virtual machine session gives vastly superior operational results. That is, in my experience, users who think they will get good usage out of a dual-boot setup are overly optimistic, and have not stopped to consider how disruptive of one's computing it is to shut everything down and reboot. In the long term, I've noticed, they stay 99.9% of the time in one OS and ignore the other. Which means they've wasted their time and effort. By contrast, a VM approach (given adequate RAM and CPU to make both OSes comfortable) allows and encourages concurrent use of both operating systems.
I agree totally. The last time I dual booted for any reason other than temporarily loading Windows when getting an Optus cable moved or contacting their tech support (an operation done only 2-3 times!) would be in the order of 10 years ago, and even the last aforementioned "Optus test" would have been 8-9 years ago. And it is precisely for the reason you stated above. I found the hassle of rebooting to switch OSs, even while sharing diskspace between them and having a number of applications configured so they could run under different OSs (where possible) on the same data, was simply too time consuming. In 2003 or 2004 I purchased a copy of VMware Workstation (the only viable option at the time), and I never looked back. I still have a VM (running Windows 2000) from that era, though now it runs under VMware Fusion on a Mac. It's done the rounds of host OSs, Linux, Windows and OS X. :) For me, virtualisation has proven to be a vastly superior solution to dual/triple booting, except in rare circumstances, such as one soundcard based data comms application, which doesn't run well under VMware (a problem which will be solved by using a hardware TNC, rather than the software one, when funds permit). Interestingly, another soundcard based data comms application which uses a much more sophisticated software modem runs flawlessly in a VMware VM. Go figure... 73 de VK3JED / VK3IRL http://vkradio.com