this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
172 points (96.7% liked)
Linux
48220 readers
630 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
For the work part in particular, you may find that a virtual machine will get the job done pretty well. With modern CPUs there's basically no overhead, so it's often easier to just run the OS you need in a VM.
You can just run it in the background, run your .NET and SQL server and stuff, possibly VSCode remote into it. PowerShell over SSH. If you need to run a GUI application, you can just RDP into it. FreeRDP has a cool feature where it can RDP a single application so it pops up as any other app on the host. Works great when you just need the database's GUI or whatever.
With virtio drivers and everything, it will be essentially as fast as if native. GUI will be slow because of software rendering, but the point is to use it as a server and only use the GUI as necessary, and for server stuff RDP isn't too bad given it's basically localhost network.
There's also the fun but painful world of VFIO and passing through a real GPU into the VM and feeding back the video to the host with Looking Glass. It's so good you can game on that (anticheat still won't work though, they don't like VMs), so if RDP bothers you that's an option. Although in my experience, Visual Studio is just as slow and buggy natively, so I wouldn't bother and just RDP.
If you add virtiofs to the mix, in theory you can share the code folder and use VSCode on the host and compile on the guest, or even compile on the host and run on the guest. Or send compile commands to Windows over SSH from VSCode. I have my entire Steam library (and Proton containers) on virtiofs and it works perfectly, so I have to imagine a code project should work nicely as well.
Virtual machines are an awesome tool. There's also the benefit of keeping all the work stuff in a big isolated container. If you have multiple projects you can make multiple VMs and not worry about one project needing version X and the other version Y of whatever.
And this is why I didn't comment. I knew someone had already suggested the VM way. This is the best way to keep your stuff separate from work related.
I don't like VMs because I need to allocate memory upfront for it, and considering it's a Windows VM and depending on the dev work you're doing on it you might need to give it 10Gb+.
If it's at all possible for OP I'd recommend getting a separate physical workstation and then just remoting into it with your Linux machine, if you use VSCode the process is pretty much seamless, you use VSCode from your Linux machine normally while all the work is being done on the remote machine.
That's a great idea, can I use the 2 screens of my PC doing that?
Not sure what you mean exactly. The Windows workstation machine could be accessed remotely from anywhere. I mean sure you're gonna have to hook it up to a monitor to set it up but after that you shouldn't have to access it directly, at least not often.