So basically Windows apps will have to be run under a simulator or you have to shell out $ to get the Linux version. Is there a performance degradation in the app when run in a VM?
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My solution is to run windows 7 in a VM so that I can use old programs that are only found in windows. There are like 5 programs that I can only find in windows that is why I have windows 7.
But 95% of my life is now run on Linux…
Lineage OS on my Phones… google, microsoft, apple are not part of my life.
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Firefox has the ability to export your bookmarks, put them on a USB, and … set yourself free 
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That is a VM. It emulates or virtualizes the hardware. Then paravirtualization, is when you enable the virtual machine extensions in your bios, then the VM can talk directly to the processor skipping the software translation layer. It is a huge performance gain. BUT you need drivers in the guest operating system aka windows in this case to be able to do that, which redhat did make and get signed.
Last I knew Vbox did not do the paravirtualization part. Vbox and VMware both put configurations in their drive images, so doing stuff like boot drive containing a windows install doesn’t work. But KVM is competitive with VMWare. You can also assign devices to the VM so you can give it a network card, graphics card or say USB bus or device like the printer and the VM is completely in charge of that device.
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This is the VM I use. There is a learning curve, but keeping windows in it’s box is a good thing
I have been thinking about doing the same thing to my phone running in a VM so the phone can’t report on me
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I prefer applications like Wine or Bottles. I’m trying Bottles now and I can run Creality Print in full screen. Slicer programs can be graphics intensive and I’m not having any issues. The nice thing about Bottles is it doubles as a manager for all the Windows applications you want to run and saves it into a library. You can also run multiple instances with little to no issue.
Now that I’ve solved this issue I have no complaints about Linux now.
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Just a little update, Day 2 of being on Linux. My Thinkpad T480 battery life is a lot better. It’s amazing how much junk goes on in the background on Windows.
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Thinkpads are probably the best supported laptop especially when they were IBM designed models.
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What happens to windows when you convert to Linux? If you start to load Linux and screw it up somehow do you just end up in cyber hell with not OS at all? I’d like to hear from some non-tech savy person who has accomplished this probably moronically simple operation. I’m pretty good with bolts and welding rod. Neither is useful with this.
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If you put a Linux OS on a CD or thumb drive you can try it out before installing.
You can either share the Hard Drive with the two operating systems as a Dual Boot that you choose when booting up the PC or totally wipe Windows from the system. If you don’t have a backup of that Windows then it’s gone.
But yeah if you somehow goof it up you’ll have to re-install an operating system.
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How large a drive do you need to have the Linux OS on? I would love to try it out.
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You can dual boot if you need both, but you can also run each independently.
Recovery is possible, even when things go wrong. I bricked my daughter’s brand new tablet, it got stuck in a boot loop and I couldn’t do anything with it. My son somehow got it working.
If you’re worried, pick up an inexpensive secondhand machine you don’t care about and see how it goes.
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This is a great way to start. With the size of Windows, it’s hard to believe a cd can hold all you really need to start. This is also a good way to recover a machine with non-responsive Windows. Boot from the cd or usb drive, and you can see and recover files from the Windows hard drive.
I haven’t used linux for a while, but my “newer” machines are still running (maybe walking) Windows 7, and are no longer very peppy. There were versions of Puppy Linux that were fairly easy to work with. But that was ten years ago or more. Maybe others can suggest something more contemporary,
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You don’t need a “drive.” You can boot the computer from a cd or memory card or usb memory stick. If it fits a cd, and they used to, that’s what, 700 MB? Very handy if you have a trashed hard drive.
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Here’s a place to start until someone who knows more makes a suggestion:
https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/
Read slowly and patiently. There’s a lot of jargon to figure out as you go along, but the zero cost makes it attractive.
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Try the USB Thumbdrive, the DVD’s are slow. The other way is to use virtualbox on windows but that is slow.
fedora recommends a minimum of 15gb for their system for a desktop install, which includes a bunch of desktop applications like the browser and libreoffice, etc. You can get smaller. linux is kind of like a salad bar, where you can build your own salad, and everything is layered on top, but they aren’t always the same layers. However, the same software programs work almost identically between distributions.
The RaspberryPi Foundation has the PiOS which is their Operating system for the raspberrypi ported to x86 hardware. Which is good for older hardware, but x86 doesn’t have the gpio pins for the automation types of electronic circuitry.
You can also get a raspberry pi, but don’t use an SD card for the harddrive, they are slow and have reliability issues. an old spinny sata drive with a usb/sata adapter cable speeds up the system and is far more reliable.
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Not large at all. I run Raspbian from a 32GB micro sd card. That’s pretty small.
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Make sure you have a backup for your data, the sd cards die since they really arent designed for a lot of writes. The usb-sata and an ssd or spinny disk (check power requirements) is a significant performance boost.
I think the default Fedora base install was around 600MB the last time I tried it, but that is nothing but a command line interface. I don’t recommend it, unless you know what you are doing, and building a server from the ground up. 
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I got Linux Mint installed on a 8gb memory card with about 1.5gb free. Cody, what version of Wine did you use with Mint? I went to their site and didn’t see any Mint versions.
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I’ll have to check when I get off of work
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