Your Windows 10 PC will soon be ‘junk’ - users told to resist Microsoft deadline::If you’re still using Windows 10 and don’t want to upgrade to Windows 11 any time soon you might want to sign a new online petition
Your Windows 10 PC will soon be ‘junk’ - users told to resist Microsoft deadline::If you’re still using Windows 10 and don’t want to upgrade to Windows 11 any time soon you might want to sign a new online petition
In line with many folks’ suggestions here, I’m ALL for switching to Linux full time after playing around with a few distros… BUT, I use dxo Photolab for photo editing which doesn’t run on Linux, yes, even through wine etc.
Also yes, I know the are a bunch of great Foss alternatives. I’ve tried them all. Nothing touches the results from my current program unfortunately.
I would be stoked if anyone could enlighten me as to how I could get that working.
I can highly recommend either using windows as a VM in virtualbox, or simply dual boot. I’m using Linux 99% of the time, but I still boot into windows occasionally for some firmware updates or software that does not work with Linux.
Have looked at dual boot before but it seemed like a ( admittedly fairly minor) pita. File sharing/ access across both systems is my main concern. Thanks for your response.
File access across systems is no problem.
It just has to be a separate partition either in the form of a whole SSD/HDD or as a partition on your main drive. Just make it NTFS (a file system that all those OSes know) it works with both windows and linux. I still have 3 NTFS partitions from my dual-boot days.
FWIW, I only needed to install one package to be able to read the drive that my Windows install is located on/a shared drive between my two installs. It has been very easy to access the Windows partition from my linux install, but I have not needed to access my linux partition from the Windows install yet, so can’t speak to the ease of doing this.
Like others have said, file sharing works pretty well with NTFS. I’ve had some issues playing games on steam that are on NTFS drives, but most work well. Also some issues accessing files from Cura for some reason. Other than that I have had no issues sharing files between w11 and Linux.
If you can, I recommend getting a dedicated SSD to install Linux on, and I’d recommend getting PopOS or Linux Mint as your distro. Both are Debian/Ubuntu derivatives, but are even easier and just overall better distros than Ubuntu imo, and most hardware and software will be compatible ootb without any tinkering.
Yeah, just make a drive/partition NTFS, and it will be usable by both systems. Please note that some Linux software doesn’t work well with NTFS, for example Timeshift (backup utility) and Steam Proton, so it’s best to have an ext4/btrfs drive for things you do exclusively on Linux and NTFS for common files of both systems (like documents, music, films, whatever)
I usually use USB sticks for sharing files between VM and host.
I personally had much better experience with QEMU than Virtualbox (although all my VMs are Linux, so might be specifics here).
Your best bet is virtualization. I use that for my CAD software, games that dont run under linux and Microsoft office
This allows me to only use Windows that 10% of the time I need my software and be using linux for all other stuff.
Only issue is that it requires some effort to get it going and some additional hardware if you want to run both at the same time.
Nice, i will take a look at this. With virtualization are both OS able to share files/ access the same files?
Not by default, but can be set up without much PITA.
Kind of… You usually can mount a directory or similar from the Host machines (Linux in this case) on the Guest (windows in this case). It uses a virtual fs so it doesn’t matter the filesystem used on the host or similar. That said due this is slower than direct use of files.
Alternative even if that wasn’t a thing you could always do a network share in SMB or similar and as long as they have access to network it would work too.
You have a W10 license, so just run up a VM, and install your software in that. Whilst it will be marginally slower, it will be 100% compatible and run on your host OS (this is not good for gaming in general, but if the VM software you use supports passthrough, mainly for GPU, then its pretty negligible).
Keep the Win10 VM off the WAN, and who cares how out of date it is and lacking in security updates.
Lots of people suggesting VM, but you can also consider dual boot.
I use Linux for everything except for the very few things were I can’t (specific games for example). That way you have the best of both worlds.
I even have it set up in different drives and use the MOBO boot menu to choose, so no worries about Windows breaking stuff