I already voted NO in this poll, VM's are not a good way to try out Linux. This was confirmed again last week when I tried to install Slackware to try it as an alternative to Debian.

One must realize that Slackware must be a good and solid distro. It cannot be that there is such a large group of really, really devoted Slack users if this distro does not offer a vast amount of advantages. Altough not for everyone, I would not recommend Slack to a new Linux user, but I consider myself well-seasoned and knowledgable in Linux.

However, I am extremely disappointed running Slack/XFCE in Virtualbox. I can get it configured all right, and rebooting is less trouble that rebooting hardware, but performance is way below any acceptable level. Tweaking the VB network so the Slack machine has its own network connection (instead of NAT) is more difficult than setting up networking in Slack itself. Looking at this, my decision would be to scrap Slack at once.

So I cannot draw any other conclusion that running Slack in a VM is a disasaster. Obviously I won't drop Slackware, but the next experiment will be directly on the hardware.

jlinkels

I concur

The VM's just cant run the system as its supposed to be run
the only Linux distro I have ever seen boot really fast( like 35sec from menu-to-desktop )
is DSL 4.4.10 in portable-qemu.
and thats off usb or hdd

almost all other systems are much slower

So, I say No, VM's are not a good way to try Linux
and I dont think Wubi is a good way either

Hello jlinkels,

I have been running Slackware in a VM for quite some time and I have to say it runs really fast. Luckily I have not experienced any problems whatever so far.

funnyG

What hardware are you running on and what VM?

jlinkels

running via VM is slower than normal

I do it the other way 'round. I run Linux hosts and Windows in VMs. Do it all the time, every day.

In fact, I just installed Windows 7 Professional in a VMware virtual machine. It runs very fast (quite close to "native" full speed), uses all the Aero features, no issues at all with resource-intensive multimedia, and to this point seems to work exactly like Windows 7 in a native install would work.

I see no reason to not use a VM if you want to learn Linux that way. It takes nothing away from the experience. Good VMs are now quite good. As I sit here, I am running one copy of Windows 7 Pro, two copies of Windows 2000, and one copy of Knoppix 6, all hosted by my Mandriva workstation that is running VMware Workstation 7. I'm still debugging the Win 7 installation and making it play well with my virtual network...and getting all the configuration stuff set up so I can use it as a development and test platform.

Virtual machines vastly vastly vastly increase the flexibility, security, and useability of your hardware. Seems like a good way to learn Linux; you can really hose the installation...and roll right back.

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