As a fun experiment, I do my day-to-day computing entirely in a Virtualbox Windows VM guest that I've given 2 cores, 150GB of storage and 4GB of RAM. I'm about a year and a half into the experiment and still chugging along.
It's a surprisingly performant day-to-day system, which I can snapshot to try out things, move to other machines if I need to, make backups etc. About the only thing it doesn't do well is really CPU intensive or GPU intensive operations.
But it works fine for 2 monitors, web browsing, watching videos, etc.
It's kind of surprising actually.
From time to time I'll also spin up some Linux VMs and do various dev activities in a real Linux, which I usually just background and ssh into from my Windows VM. It's kind of nice having a virtual rack of machines to monkey around on.
Less impressive has been trying to get Ubuntu to not feel terrible, but Centos works fine.
If I need better performance, I'll dive back to the host OS and do those things, but it's mostly just for gaming or music production.
Bonus, my host OS has stayed relatively free of junk and stays really snappy, even all this time later.
My only recent problem is that the Windows 10 updater won't qualify the VM guest for the upgrade. So I'll probably have to grab the ISO and try it that way.
It's a surprisingly performant day-to-day system, which I can snapshot to try out things, move to other machines if I need to, make backups etc. About the only thing it doesn't do well is really CPU intensive or GPU intensive operations.
But it works fine for 2 monitors, web browsing, watching videos, etc.
It's kind of surprising actually.
From time to time I'll also spin up some Linux VMs and do various dev activities in a real Linux, which I usually just background and ssh into from my Windows VM. It's kind of nice having a virtual rack of machines to monkey around on.
Less impressive has been trying to get Ubuntu to not feel terrible, but Centos works fine.
If I need better performance, I'll dive back to the host OS and do those things, but it's mostly just for gaming or music production.
Bonus, my host OS has stayed relatively free of junk and stays really snappy, even all this time later.
My only recent problem is that the Windows 10 updater won't qualify the VM guest for the upgrade. So I'll probably have to grab the ISO and try it that way.