Of late, I have become a heavy user of virtual machines, which allows me to safely play with multiple distros on the same machine and write about them.

Hardware support has become less and less important and the focus has shifted to the unique features of distros.

Thanks to work done by kernel developers like Greg Kroah-Hartman, most hardware works out of the box on Linux. I needed to know how well it worked with “real” metal. As a Linux journalist, I could not rely on a virtual machine to review a distro and recommend it. A Linux user needed to interact with “real” hardware to find solution a virtual machine was out of question. Every time you came across a new device, you had to find drivers and wrappers to make things work. As a Linux advocate who would take pains to convert users to Linux, virtual machines served no purpose for me.īack in 2005, the greatest challenge for Linux was hardware: wireless wouldn’t work Bluetooth might not work, graphics would give glitches and even USB devices like tablet pens refused to talk. I must admit I haven’t been a huge fan of virtual machines for personal use until recently.

Virtual mac on linux