Virtual Machines for PC

[=VG= Inch]

Is there any best one for running an OS in a 2 GB RAM's?

I see Oracle VMs, VMWare, Virtual Box etc. etc.

Would like to experiment and see it myself about it. Hopefully can get a lot of knowledge on what's good and bad between OS'es (for likely, new PC Rig in future)

 

- Inch

[Jeffu]

I used both VirtualBox and VMWare when I still used Windows. VMWare came across as a more polished product, but either will work fine for what you need it to do.

[=VG= Inch]

That helps, thanks man

[=VG= Acro1]

So @=VG= Inch What OS'es are you thinking of, and what's your rig's purpose?

[=VG= Inch]

14 hours ago, =VG= Acro1 said:

So @=VG= Inch What OS'es are you thinking of, and what's your rig's purpose?

OS im looking is ofc going to be Windows 10, bit i would like to try Linux, because its free (but idk anything about it, i only heard that its much lightweight compared to Windows... there's also Ubuntu and derivatives, like Kubuntu, Lubuntu etc.)

 

Mostly for gaming and multimedia task, decent multi tasking ability, thats all what i need in future.

 

PS: The PC that im looking to build in future is a combination of AMD chipset and ATi GPU/VGA.

[=VG= Acro1]

If you want a decent and 'flawless' gaming experience, Windows is your guy. No OS is perfect but Windows remains the top choice for gaming because it offers so much hardware support out of the box. Game publishers design their shizzle to be used on Windows primarily.

Gaming is not impossible on Ubuntu and other Linux distros, but you'll run into several caveats likely. Performance is almost always lower especially for non-linux titles. Support for graphics cards and peripherals is not always available or free of bugs. Each game specifically will have quirks that may not play well within Linux, so you won't always know which titles are playable.

For multimedia purposes, Linux distros offer great possibilities tho. You can use a general-purpose distro like Ubuntu, Mint or Elementary and just load it with great open-source tools like Blender, InkScape, ShotCut/Olive, GIMP and Krita. For me, literally the only creative software I'd consider paying for is Adobe's After Effects and Premiere, since they're top-notch for video editing. Any other 2D or 3D design task can be achieved within Blender/Krita/Inkscape with very little extra effort required, if any. Blender is actually praised for it's lightspeed workflow when modeling, and InkScape's UI and handles are way more user friendly than Adobe Illustrator IMO. Blender has also showed benchmarks where renders were noticeably faster in Linux compared to Windows, though that changes with technology.

39 minutes ago, =VG= Inch said:

i only heard that its much lightweight compared to Windows

In general yes. Windows 10 wants to use approx. 1-3GB of RAM by default. Linux distros usually use less. Some distros like Damn Small Linux, Puppy or TinyCore are so small that they run entirely in RAM memory. You can boot them from a USB drive, remove the drive and still use the PC normally. For graphical purposes though, I'm thinking you'd want a general purpose (Linux thats kinda like Windows) which are bigger.

One distro called Ubuntu Studio is geared towards creative use. It comes loaded with the creative sector's leading open source applications for design, video/sound editing, and more. Gaming, as mentioned before, will be more challenging.

There's a shit ton of things about Linux that make it awesome, and a good number of things why you may still want to use Windows

 

Regardless of this, you can run any linux distro as a VM for free by using VirtualBox.

[=VG= SemlerPDX]

Slightly off topic question (don't mind me Inch) - as I start diving into optimization of wee little programs I write like this voice control stuff, I sit here happy I didn't update my laptop to Win10, so I can test things I make in a Win7 environment (and a slower system at that) as well as in Win10 (on the computer I wrote the program(s) upon) - should I be using VM's for cross platform or optimizations testing of programs/scripts I write which are designed for public distribution?

Is that what a proper programmer might do to ensure their thing works on an older build, or is running fast enough on a slower machine?  Meaning, should I make a few VM's in both Win7 and Win10 with low/medium/high specs (using my high spec PC) to get loading time or run time tests for any ol' program I may write that relies upon speed?

Was considering this for a long time, but didn't know if it was just too much work or if there was some other better way to do these sorts of things to eval the speed/optimization of a program/applet I wrote...

[Jeffu]

11 hours ago, =VG= Acro1 said:

Gaming is not impossible on Ubuntu and other Linux distros, but you'll run into several caveats likely. Performance is almost always lower especially for non-linux titles. Support for graphics cards and peripherals is not always available or free of bugs. Each game specifically will have quirks that may not play well within Linux, so you won't always know which titles are playable.

Gaming on Linux has largely turned to virtual machines. It is possible to hand a GPU over to a virtual machine to allow it to play games and use hardware acceleration for programs at native performance.