Hello, people!
My goal here is to run Linux for most of my work/school tasks with the exception of some cases for Work…I need to optimize this exception.
I have a X1 carbon 3rd gen laptop with an i7 5600U, 8gb of RAM, and 256 SSD. I’m trying to make Linux my daily driver in every way so I want to set it as my main OS for my laptop, with no dual-boot. I need to run a Windows 10 for work purposes on a weekly , so I’d like to optimize THE HELL out of this laptop, as much as possible. Eventually I plan on upgraded to a newer laptop but for now I’d like to get the most out of this laptop in the meantime.
Is that possible without having problems? I have some cases where I can run software through CrossOver or natively but there are some cases where I need to run assistive technologies like JAWS screen reader + Zoom, or Kurzweil 3000 + Zoom for students… so Windows 10 vm is needed, unfortunately.
I’ve used VM’s before, currently having a Windows 10 VM on my desktop - which, I had crashed on me once. I’ve optimized Windows best I could with taking away effects, no-auto start applications, disabling features like file indexing, Google Chrome auto start and a whole bunch, xbox gaming, lots. This was on my desktop with, which I gave the VM 3 cores, 8gb of RAM, and dynamic storage with Virtualbox.
For the laptop, I’m thinking around the same but with 4gb of RAM…is this worth the hassle if its going to crash on me again? I considering even running the Windows 10 in VM with maxed settings without crashing my laptop, but at that point, I should just dual-boot right?
I’m no expert in VM’s so I could have messed up or improved there so any suggestions are appreciated/advice is appreciated. Hoping I can run a lighter Windows 10 experience on Linux , that be be great.
Instead of Windows 10, use Windows Server with a desktop as a guest, much more lightweight. That is of course, if you can get a hold of it. Used to do that when developing .NET years ago, all I needed was Visual Studio to work and W10 is too phat of a phuck to be graceful. So you could technically do with 4GB.
Chris Titus Tech had a good vid on the YouTube about how to strip all of the cruft out of W10 in order to create your own custom, lightweight W10 ISO. He’s on LBRY now, too.
This is the one … I think:
https://lbry.tv/@christitustech:5/minimal-windows-10-install-iso-creation:2
Use KVM under virt-manager for sure. While it’s a bit harder to setup, it’s the most flexible and advance solution on Linux.
The best thing I’ve found for accelerating windows performance is to use virt-io. You can pass through a raw partition, but I like LVM because there’s the option to thin-provision, and snapshot and also fits in nicely with default LUKS/DM-crypt setups.
Though because of driver signing issues, you have to have the install the drivers at install which forces it to accept the red-hat driver certificate. Changing the cache policy can further accelerate disk performance.
For network, likewise bridging to the physical adapter offers the best performance, and the intel chip-sets on the X1 should support it just fine.
In theory intel GV-t should work on the processors iGPU, but I ran into stability issues on an X1 carbon with the 6600U, and it’s also fairly tricky to set up. QXL+spice should work reasonably well especially if you are tweaking Win10 guest settings for a plain desktop and disabling fancy toolbars/windows.
Disabling cortana requires a group policy edit, and disabling search suggestions is a registry edit now. Which is why I suggest the pro version. 2 cores and 4GB should be adequate.