I have a friend thats setting up linux (ubuntu) on his machine. He has a windows installation. I personally use mac as my primary OS, but I’ve had a linux partition on my machine as well, and I’m having a slightly hard time giving him good advice as to what solution he should choose when setting up linux (I don’t even know how I would partition a disk on a windows machine to prep it for dual booting).
My question is quite simple: What are the pros/cons of WSL vs. Dual Booting vs. Virtualbox, both with regards to setup and with regards to usage?
WSL2 is “fine”. It has some performance issues when accessing files on the windows side of things from sick
On a technical level it’s a Linux VM running containers for Distributions that get some mounts and for WSLg a directx video device.
WSLg also provides an X server, Wayland compositor and a Pulse server so most gui apps “just work”.
Good way to start learning or get a taste for things, and easier than a VM to get started.
You don’t get the immersion of a new OS when you use wsl though. Which is fine if you just want some Linux compatibility for things like docker, but if you want the whole “desktop experience” then a VM is a better option. Either Hyper-V or VirtualBox will give you that with reasonable performance.