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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.
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.
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.