I have a friend thats setting up linux (ubuntu) on his machine. He has a windows installation. I personally use mac as my primary OS, but I’ve had a linux partition on my machine as well, and I’m having a slightly hard time giving him good advice as to what solution he should choose when setting up linux (I don’t even know how I would partition a disk on a windows machine to prep it for dual booting).
My question is quite simple: What are the pros/cons of WSL vs. Dual Booting vs. Virtualbox, both with regards to setup and with regards to usage?
If you are going to dual boot and your computer has room for 2 drives. The way I would recommend doing it is to add a second drive for Linux, and disconnect to windows drive from the computer. Do a normal linux install. And then add the windows drive back in. Then you can set one of the drives as the default boot device and if you want to boot to the other just open the Boot options on boot.
This keeps things totally separated and you can even remove one of the drives later if you want to single boot.
Installing Linux after Windows should be fine without disconnecting drives.
The reverse is troublesome. Microsoft’s installer is all too happy to shit on your drives, even the ones you’re not using for installation. But Linux installers are much more friendly to dual-booting and all kinds of complex setups.