Given the choice between a windows laptop where I can run #linux in a VM, or a Mac. What is the lesser evil? I have no experience with windows, but I do with mac.

@publicvoit @yisraeldov
I would go for the mac. It has a Terminal, after all.

@x2ero @publicvoit @yisraeldov To be fair, so does Windows and it's actually pretty good. I set it up for the devs at work so that they can use WSL properly.

@joshfowler @x2ero @publicvoit Well I would be running linux in a VM any way so only using windows as a host. New job's IT department only allows Windows and Mac. They need to have some antivirus and other things.

@yisraeldov @x2ero @publicvoit I would personally go for a Mac at this point as the OS feels more stable and doesn't force updates or resets settings randomly.

@joshfowler @x2ero @publicvoit My question is more how seemless will it be to run linux in a VM full screen. Can I ignore windows? and just pretend that I have a linux machine?

@x2ero @yisraeldov @publicvoit I know in the Linux world you can pass through a GPU via VirtIO so that the VM basically has direct access to the GPU and can do full 3D acceleration etc but I don't know about doing that with a Windows or Mac host.

@yisraeldov I did this many years ago but I guess it's a different game now. So I can't tell you anything up-to-date on that. I try to avoid VMs since it introduced boundaries that were not the UX-friendly in any case.

@yisraeldov @joshfowler @x2ero When I'm asking for requirements, it's way more detailed than that. There are large difference if you only want to use bash for file management or for coding or for running a local database or file server or or or...

@publicvoit @joshfowler @x2ero Will be doing mostly javascript development, and I use emacs. I also use nix for package management.

@yisraeldov Can't tell anything about nix as I'm unsure about its level of effort and learning (in contrast to deb-based distros I'm using).

For running Emacs with all of its companion libraries and tools I do think that WSL is really good meanwhile.

I've good experience with chocolatey as a Windows package manager as well but I didn't push it to expert level here. I'm glad my current company let's me choose most of my tools freely.

@yisraeldov I do find this quite amusing: they don't let you run Linux which lacks substantial malware because they need to run an anti-malware software? 😆
OK, I get it. Maximizing for security theater instead for real security it seems.

@publicvoit Yeah, I had the same thought. First time I'm working at a large enough company that has an IT department. I usually just set up my own machine. My wife got a mac from work, and they put so much garbage on it that it was unstable.

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