[davidscolgan]

My strategy has for a long time been to run Windows 10 for all of my browsers and games and paint programs and then run a virtual machine of linux with VirtualBox. I just use terminal Vim, so I run the virtual machine headless and ssh into it with a cygwin terminal.

It's a bit janky but no more janky than actually running Linux on a laptop. No worries about my HDMI projector connection working, no fighting with wifi, games on Steam work, and I get a full Linux for development.

The magic comes from proxying my development servers (like Django's) through the guest machine into Windows. I've got it set up so that if I type `localhost:8000` into any Windows browser, it hits my virtual machine's localhost.

So yeah, complicated, but from what I can see it gives me the best setup I know of with the least amount of fighting with the operating system.

[SomeHacker44]

I love this. Thanks for sharing. I wonder if there is a way to make a true dual system on Windows, with full graphical support (even if it is the Linux console), where you can flip between Windows desktop, Linux Desktop (if desired), and Linux console with a "switch desktop" hotkey.

I think I will try this on one of my windows computers. I can't switch from Mac to Linux because I use too much non Linux software, but most of it is on Windows. Adobe suite, Ableton, Native Instruments, etc.

Does anyone know a way to virtualize Linux like the thought above please?

[davidscolgan]

You can certainly install a windowing environment into the virtual machine. I've done this a few times when I actually needed a windowing environment inside of Linux for complicated servers or doing things across multiple ports. It works just fine, and VirtualBox even has a "seamless" mode where it sort of feels like you have windows from both environments.

If you can set up Linux, you can set this up too.