Linux in VM for everyday office and internet

Kaipirinha

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Has anyone ever actually done this successfully (see title)? If yes, which Linux distribution and virtualization (Hyper-V, VMware, Virtual Box) did you use?
Office and Internet should be no problem with Firefox and libre office but I can’t reach a state that is actually fun to work with every day.

At the moment I am trying Hyper-V on Windows 10 Pro with CentOS8.1 and my major problems are:
-GUI feels very sluggish like very low GPU performance or refresh rate
-can’t run native Fullscreen because my monitor resolution 3840x2160 is “out of range”, when I reboot after setting it with grubby.
Before that I tried Hyper-V+Ubuntu. But I am more interested in the general question above.
thanks.
 


I've used about all of them.
libvirt, qemu, hyperV, virtualBox, VMware, pxe, and a few others.

Just curious, are you running the proprietary AMD/nVidia video drivers?
If not, I would recommend installing them.
Do you have virtualization tuned on in your BIOS/UEFI settings?
Have you installed the "xorg-x11-drv-vmware" rpm?
 
Hi, thanks for your reply.
Which combination of a virtualisation Platform and Linux distribution can you recommend for easy everyday use?

-I have virtualisation enabled in BIOS.
-"xorg-x11-drv-vmware" seems to be for wmware, right? hyperv-daemons was already installed, when I tried, so I thought I had nothing else to do on that front.
-I have not installed nVidia Video drivers on the Linux guest. I didn't think the guest system would see an nVidia Card, like it doesn't have direct access to the CPU. There are no settings for Display or GPU in Hyper-V manager. Are you sure I should do this?
 
virtualBox is probably the easiest and most convenient.
the xorg drv is for any VM running under any hypervisor, not just VMware.
The guest wont see the proprietary video drivers, but they will run better if the
host (server) system has them installed.
 
Thanks. I didn't know about the xorg drv but found out it was already installed. Sure the Host has its proper GPU driver. So no room for improvement there...
It actually has two GPUs, GeForceRTX 2080 and the onboard Intel Graphics 4600 of my i7 4790 GPU. But there are no settings in Hyper-V to select which one is used by the VM...

Can you (or anyone) still name a COMBINATION of virtualisation AND Linux OS, that runs well for everyday use?
 
Hi Kaipirinha

I use Linux Mint 19.3 as a host and the same as a guest in VirtualBox with no problem
How much memory is you pc has ?
What operating system are u using on you pc now ?
What type of disk are u using ?
Gilbert
 
My original VM was on Hyper-V, as mentioned in my original post. It was on a RAID1 but moving it to an SSD didn’t make the sluggish Desktop GUI feel any more responsive. My PC has 16GB RAM, I assign 4 to each VM, running only one at a time.

Additionally, I also tried CentOS 8.1 and Ubuntu Desktop 19.10 in VMWare Workstation 5.5 and VirtualBox 6.1, in the last 3 days. All 4 combinations worked better than CentOS in HyperV and very similar to each other.
The GUI was much more responsive in all 4 cases. CentOS produced Network problems with VMWare from time to time. In all 4 cases I was able to select various screen resolutions directly from the GUI while with Hyper-V only 800x600 was offered, so I had to use command line to change resolution.
But no combination of Hypervisor and OS was able to run native 4k in the desktop environment.

So, I found Hyper-V to be the worst and Virtual Box to be the best Hypervisor for my purpose at the moment, just as dos2unix suggested.
But I have to conclude that there is no way for me to comfortably use Linux in a VM for office and Internet work every day, as long as I need Windows to run directly on my hardware.

Thanks for trying to help!
 
Suggestion

CPU: How many core did you assign, should be half of what you have, if 4 core assign 2 no less no more, I assigned 6 out of 12
Graphics Controler: Select VMSVGA
Video Mem: assign 128M
Video 3D accelarator - Try on and off
Try assign a lite more mem. +1 Meg at a time
Dont let windows go to sleep while using a VM
Try Linux Mint Mate 19.3
Screen resolution try 1920 x 1080 scaled.
When creating the virtual hard disk try fixed allocation rather than dynamic.
Make sure you install the VirtualBox Guest Addition.

All the best, Gilbert
 
Hi Gilbert, thank you for your advice.
I am going to be travelling for a few days, starting tomorrow, but I managed to install Linux Mint MATE today and get a quick look. I like it a lot!
But the best thing is, the resolution problem is solved in VirtualBox for all Linux distributions I have tried! I had installed the guest additions for all of them but the highest resolution offered by the Desktop GUI was always 2560x1600, with guest additions and without.
But (as you probably know) with guest additions the resolution is automatically set to the windows size. If I go to fullscreen mode, the GUI goes to 4k just fine and after doing that for the first time, the 4k resolution is even added to the selection in the display menu! I never tried that before.

Thank you, guys, for all your help! Without you I wouldn’t have tried that hard and often :)
 
Happy to hear that

Did it solve the sluggish issue you where talking about in you first post.

Have a safe trip, gilbert
 
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