[u-u] dual booting [was Re: COVID-19 craziness]

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Hugh Gamble <hugh at phaedrav.com>

| You can have all your Linux without even a proper hypervisor.
| 
| Then I see somebody still trying to dual boot, and it makes me cry.

Don't cry for me.

And why "trying"?  It's pretty straight-forward.  Are you observing a
lot of failure in these attempts?

I use Windows so rarely that switching painlessly doesn't buy
me anything.  The muck of running Windows under Linux or Linux under
Windows is not worthwhile.

Why do you need or want to run Windows at all?  (Jim has already
answered this question for himself.)

Here are some common reasons:

- gaming (way more support for gaming on Windows)

- important programs that only run on Windows

- familiarity and comfort with the Windows desktop

- employer corporate standards.

Here is an exhausive list of my household's uses of Windows:

1) to update Windows.  Silly, but true.  It's amazing how horrible
   Windows Update is.

2) to update firmware on systems that only support firmware updates
   from Windows (the majority, sadly)

3) to prove to a manufacturer that a machine is broken (failing to
   work in Linux is of no interest to a manufacturer)

4) to run software to prepare our tax returns.  This is only on one or
   two systems.  For privacy reasons we don't use web-base programs
   for this.

5) on dedicated little PCs attached to our TVs: to watch CraveTV
   (through a browser).  For some reason, CraveTV refuses to work
   through a browser on Linux or Android or AndroidTV.
   Relatively recently CraveTV started supporting AndroidTV with a
   Crave App, but it is very clunky.

6) (once, very recently) to run Cisco's WebEx teleconferencing software.
   Officially, it supports Linux but it appears to have suffered
   bitrot in the 5 or so years since they last updated it.