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Linux On Windows 10: Running Ubuntu VMs Just Got a Lot Easier, Says Microsoft (zdnet.com)
Liam Tung reporting for ZDNet: Ubuntu maintainer Canonical and Microsoft have teamed up to release an optimized Ubuntu Desktop image that's available through Microsoft's Hyper-V gallery. The Ubuntu Desktop image should deliver a better experience when running it as a guest on a Windows 10 Pro host, according to Canonical. The optimized version is Ubuntu Desktop 18.04.1 LTS release, also known as Bionic Beaver. Microsoft's work with Canonical was prompted by its users who wanted a "first-class experience" on Linux virtual machines (VMs) as well as Windows VMs. To achieve this goal, Microsoft worked with the developers of XRDP, an open-source remote-desktop protocol (RDP) for Linux based on Microsoft's RDP for Windows. Thanks to that work, XRDP now supports Microsoft's Enhanced Session Mode, which allows Hyper-V to use the open-source implementation of RDP to connect to Linux VMs. This in turn gives Ubuntu VMs on Windows hosts a better mouse experience, an integrated clipboard, windows resizing, and shared folders for easier file transfers between host and guest. Microsoft's Hyper-V Quick Create VM setup wizard should also help improve the experience. "With the Hyper-V Quick Create feature added in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, we have partnered with Ubuntu and added a virtual machine image so in a few quick minutes, you'll be up and developing," said Clint Rutkas, a senior technical product manager on Microsoft's Windows Developer Team. "This is available now -- just type 'Hyper-V Quick Create' in your start menu."
Why would I want to run Linux in a Windows VM when I can do the opposite?
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Uh, we run Windows on VMs all the time. Apparently the point of the article is that hyper V is still pure shit compared to vmware or nutanix.
The broad driver and application support of Windows with the powerful UNIX-like utilities of Linux, for the majority of users that is a good combination. Yes there is a tiny percentage of computer users that feel hurt and will never forgive Microsoft for their transgressions from decades ago but that's ok, this isn't targeted at you just like whatever bespoke, non-mainstream, usability rats nest of a Linux distro you use is not aimed at the broader population of computer users.
so that more data can be stolen from the users.
I don't think you understand what the word 'stolen' means, we've been through disproving those idiotic claims made by the RIAA/MPAA many times before. In terms of what data is collected that has been made very clear now, there are pages on Microsoft's site that detail it.
Windows 10 will never touch a system I own. Period.
It's glorified spyware/adware. I don't care what it offers. Once Win7 is done, it's Linux from here on out, even with the recovery/UI issues.
Why wait?
What does Windows 8.1 actually give you that's worth keeping? That's worth the risk of making your VMs vulnerable to viruses, spyware, and other malware running on the host OS?
BTW, if you want a GUI to create & manage VMs, you can use libvirt's virt-manager.
Often hardware virtualization support defaults to off in the BIOS. With it on, there will generally be no noticable slowdown in a VM provided you give the VM a reasonable amount of RAM. You might see it called Intel VT-x or AMD-V in the BIOS. Enable it.
Sometimes people give a VM 256MB of RAM, then they are suprised that it's almost as slow as a machine with 256MB of RAM. If top performance is needed, a VM should have almost as much RAM assigned as you'd use in a bare-metal machine withh the same OS. IO buffer in the host reduce the RAM requirements a little bit.
The other thing that can happen is if you have a VM that does a ton of IO, you want to use virtio. Set the VM settings to use virtio rather than emulating a particular network card and hard drive. That can significantly faster, if the VM writes to disk a lot or it's pumping a hundreds of megabits through the network card.
[the Steam store's] attempt to be its own package manager instead of using the OS one
Which is "the OS one"? Linux does not provide a package manager. Nor does GNU alone. Package management under GNU/Linux is currently the job of distributions, and different distributions' package managers tend to be mutually incompatible. So which distribution's package manager should Steam be wrapping?
Why would I want to run Windows, AT ALL, even in a VM, even with a gun to my head, when there's GNU/Linux?
One possibility is that the hardware you have isn't very compatible, such as an ASUS Transformer Book T100TA, and PC makers specializing in GNU/Linux (such as System76) don't offer replacement laptops in your preferred size range. WSL makes Windows into a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) for a GNU system.
Right. Personal data and usage habits are completely worthless to a company like Microsoft that has absolutely no incentive to, say, push ads out to users.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to buy this new product that I just saw in my start menu.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Because some tools are just plain better on Windows. Quite some years ago I was developing software which needed to run on linux, and the software was multithreaded. The problem was that at the time, debugging multithreaded software on linux sucked donkey balls. Gdb simply could not cope with breakpoints in multithreaded code without crashing.
Visual studio otoh had no such problems, and was both a very handy tool for developing, debugging, and designing the unit tests. So I developed all infrastructure code with full test coverage on Windows, and then transferred it to a linux box and compiled everything with g++
Maybe these days, support for those use cases has improved, but at the time there was no reasonable linux based solution.
These days I mostly do it just to watch Slashdot heads explode.
Steam runs much better with Windows as the native operating system. So do other resource intensive applications. And on a laptop, especially, sacrificing a few Gig of RAM to run the hypervisor and X Windows and running Windows inside the VM is sacrificing those resources to the virtualization layer. It's why, given the choices, I will normally equip a laptop as a Windows host and run Linux as the virtual machine, using an SSH client to access the Linux host to get cut and paste operations to work best.
VMs can have direct access to hardware. Once I tried adding a Windows virtual machine on top of Linux (KVM) with a PCI graphics card dedicated to that machine. I was able to get almost 100% performance out of the card (tested with a mining software) and can even overclock it.
The issue is you need a separate PCI card for each virtual machine, (or purchase an extremely expensive server class GPU with multiple VM access). There are guides for similar setups, where you'd most likely to have the on board GPU for the Linux desktop, and a PCI one for Windows gaming VM. That also requires a KVM of sorts, since they would have discrete outputs.
This is the rational viewpoint. No wonder it was modded down to shit. Microsoft is the leader in open source. There are others but they lag far behind. In a few years when someone says "Linux" people will think of Microsoft as the default integrator and facilitator. Sorry RedHat, you tried.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock