[jlokier]

> "Even worse, try using an OS running in a VM for an extended period of time..."

I actually do this for development and it works really well.

Ubuntu Linux VM in VMware Fusion on a Macbook Pro with MacOS.

Power consumption was found to be better than running Linux natively. (I'm guessing something about switching between the two GPUs, but who knows.)

GPU acceleration works fine; the Linux desktop animations, window fading and movement animations etc are just as I'd expect.

Performance seems to be fine generally, and I do care about performance.

(But I don't measure graphics performance, perhaps that's not as good as native. And when doing I/O intensive work, that's on servers.)

Being able to do a four-finger swipe on the trackpad to switch between MacOS desktops and Linux desktops (full screen) is really nice. It feels as if the two OSes are running side by side, rather than one inside another.

I've been doing Linux-in-a-VM for about 6 years, and wouldn't switch back to native on my laptop if I had a choice. The side-by-side illusion is too good.

Before that I ran various Linux desktops (or Linux consoles :-) for about 20 years natively on all my development machines and all my personal laptops, so it's not like don't know what that's like. In general, I notice more graphics driver bugs in the native version...

(The one thing that stands out as buggy is VMware's host-to-guest file sharing is extremely buggy, to the point of corrupting files, even crashing Git. MacOS's own SMB client is also atrocious in numerous ways, to the point of even deleting random files, but does it less often so you don't notice until later what's gone. I've had to work hard to find good workarounds to have reliable files! I mention this as a warning to anyone thinking of trying the same setup.)

[q-base]

What year MBP is this? I tried running Ubuntu on Virtual Box on my mid 2014 MBP with 16GB ram, but that was anything but smooth. I ended up dual booting my T460s instead.

But perhaps the answer is VMware Fusion instead then.

[jlokier]

It's a late 2013 MBP, 16GB RAM.

I've only given Linux 6GB RAM at the moment, and it's working out fine. Currently running Ubuntu 19.10.

I picked VMware Fusion originally because it was reported to have good-ish support for GPU emulation that was compatible with Linux desktops at the time. Without it, graphics can be a bit clunky. With it, it feels smooth enough for me, as a desktop.

My browser is Firefox on the Mac side, but dev web servers all on the Linux side.

The VM networking is fine, but I use a separate "private" network (for dev networking) from the "NAT" network (outgoing connections from Linux to internet), so Wifi IP address changes in the latter don't disrupt active connections of the former.

My editor is Emacs GUI on the Mac side (so it integrates with the native Mac GUI - Cmd-CV cut and paste etc, better scrolling), although I can call up Emacs sessions from Linux easily, and for TypeScript, dev language servers etc., Emacs is able to run them remotely as appropriate.

Smoothness over SSH from iTerm is a different thing from graphical desktop smoothness.

When doing graphics work (e.g. Inkscape/GIMP/ImageMagick), or remote access to Windows servers using Remmina for VNC/RDP, I use the Linux desktop.

But mostly I do dev work in Linux over SSH from iTerm. I don't think I've ever noticed any smoothness issues with that, except when VMware networking crashes due to SMB/NFS loops that I shouldn't let happen :-)

[q-base]

Thanks a lot for the long through reply. It sounds like I might want to give VMware Fusion a go if I want to play around with Linux on my MBP again.

[vetinari]

The answer is I/O latency.

Having your VM stored inside a file on a slow filesystem is bad. Having a separate lvm volume (on linux)/zvols (with zfs)/partition/disk is much more performant.

[jlokier]

I store my Linux VM disk inside a file on a Mac filesystem (HFS+, the old one), and I haven't noticed any significant human-noticable I/O latency issues when using it. The Linux VM disk is formatted as ext4.

That's about human-scale experience, rather than measured latency. It won't be as fast as native, but it seems adequate for my use, even when grepping thousands of files, unpacking archives, etc, and I haven't noticed any significant stalling or pauses. It's encrypted too (by MacOS).

(That's in contrast to host-guest file access over the virtual network, which definitely has performance issues. But ext4 on the VM disk seems to work well.)

The VM is my main daily work "machine", and I'm a heavy user, so I'd notice if I/O latency was affecting use.

I'm sure it helps that the Mac has a fast SSD though.

(In contrast, on servers I use LVM a lot, in conjunction with MD-RAID and LUKS encryption.)