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?”
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.
Neat thing I learned recently: create and attach a second virtual disk for data, set it to writethrough mode in virtualbox. That way it is excluded from snapshots and rollbacks.