Chris WiegmanI’ve been using Linux off-and-on for about the last 10 years. At times it has even been my only operating system on whatever computer I was using. The thing was I wouldn’t dual-boot and none of the virtual machines I tried could really keep up with what I was doing.
As for the dual boot, it just never seemed worth it to waste so much of my hard-drive space so I could waste more time switching between operating systems whenever I needed something on the other one. As for the virtual machines, although they would load a guest OS, they tended to make one system or the other almost unusable in that switching between the two was often less than a pleasant experience. Heck, I don’t know how many times I’ve killed either the guest or the host when the VM did something it shouldn’t.
Finally, as of last week, I think I’ve found a VM I really like. Actually, it’s a VM I’ve used for some time, but until it’s latest update I found it less than an enjoyable experience. This new [updated] VM is VirtualBox by Sun. In the 2.0 release last week it is more stable, and seems to be much more efficient in how it handles the resources on the host system. Finally I can run Ubuntu for various tasks on my primary machine without having to worry about how long I have until the next crash!