I just recently discovered that VMWare got purchased by Broadcom, and that performance took a hit for quite a while before the latest version (sorry for the Reddit link: https://old.reddit.com/r/vmware/comments/1m1u2kj/vmware_workstation_1764_finally_a_ray_of_hope/)
I also learned that Hyper-V is actually quite good nowadays, and just switched to it recently for when I have to use Windows as the main OS. It runs quite well.
Unless you have a specific need for some specific feature there’s nothing wrong with Hyper-V, it works quite well. And it’s already built into all the Windows Pro/Server OSes since at least Windows 10.
I’ve never done anything like gaming with it / never tried to dedicate a GPU for it so it’s possible you need something else if that’s more along the lines of what you’re after.
Hyper-V is definitely very good now
virtualbox is an option.
usually I only bother with linux on windows via WSL2, since my work only allows windows machines
I’m not sure what the situation is now, but does WSL2 allow to run GUI apps? I vaguely remember the first WSL was mostly for terminal stuff
You can - it has some additional setup.
I mention WSL2 solely as what I use to virtualise linux. on my personal stuff I run linux as the host
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-apps
Interesting, thanks
VirtualBox performance is still pretty bad.
You can download VMware Workstation for free.
I’m using VMware 17.5 because they removed Unity in later versions.
Works fine.
fdisk 😉
But seriously, I’d say see if for your use case you can get away with either WSL, Docker Desktop, or a combination of the two. That’ll be way less heavy than running a full Linux system on Windows. Failing that, my recommendation is VirtualBox.
qemu / virt-manager
WSL2, its quick and easy once setup, and you don’t have to have a VM since it is its own VM. Then you can run both Linux apps and windows apps on the same desktop environment, even sharing files/ folders



