My daughter is starting a college computing course next month and has been told they will be using linux.
She has a fairly recent, last 5yrs or less I think, intel macbook but knows nothing about linux or vm’s.
I advised her to install Ubuntu in a VM when she asked about it, she asked how to do this. Initial thought is Virtualbox but I’ve not used MacOS since well before it became MacOS nor used VirtualBox in many years, have heard of new shiny new things like UTM, Parallels & VMWare.
Is it a reasonable suggestion to just use VirtualBox? Is there a better option?
Bit of a dad moment; “Just install Linux and then I can help you”, “But how do I install Linux dad?”
Least expensive is Virtualbox or UTM.
Simplest is Parallels.
The easiest is probably, as much as I hate to say it, would be to use VirtualBox. It’s certainly the least expensive option.
I am partial to a dedicated throwaway laptop because I have had the displeasure of accidentally blowing away my VM image’s code files on a roll-back, which is harder to do on bare metal. The biggest lesson learned their was to immediately learn how to use a remote server for code repository and push to dev branches often.
Does she need a GUI VM?
If not, multipass from Canonical is pretty great to spin up quick headless Ubuntu VMs on macOS.
Otherwise, UTM is definitely my second choice.
I guess also depends what they’ll be doing. She could in theory install XQuartz and run GUI apps over SSH but that might become more complicated.
If they’re gonna do networking and stuff I’d maybe also get into VirtualBox just because networking in VirtualBox is easier to deal with. UTM is kind of like using libvirt on Linux, it relies on the host to do a bunch of stuff like bridges and firewalls whereas VirtualBox just handles most of it internally and has a nicer GUI for it.
Is it reasonable to advise someone who is new to this stuff on MacOS to just installl Ubuntu on VirtualBox?
VMWare offers free personal licenses, and it’s one of the best VM solutions imo
