I really would prefer to get my personal / business machine off of Windows.

The VM is a development environment that has to be Windows, and isn’t a big deal to me since it’s just a bunch of other dev tools and third party software.

That may be a good option. It’s a minor pain, but mostly just because the email notification has been down there for like ~20 years so it would be nice for it to still be there, but it’s definitely not a show stopper.

Probably worth a shot.

The Windows VM will still be needed for native Windows programming, that will have to happen for at least another decade.

I could have sworn that was Windows only from the notification I got (they switched from icon on minimize to icon on close).

If it works in Linux, that would be great.

Yea, I just need to convert one of my existing non critical images from VMware to one of the other formats, and start experimenting until I find something that works.

But I spend 40+ hours a week in the VM (even on Windows), so I’ll have to spend some time testing and make sure everything is solid (and don’t want to deal with rebuilding the image, so I need to migrate it).

The only reason I’m even running VMware is that when I moved to VMs for dev machines in 2010 I needed multiple monitor and USB support, and at the time VMware was the only option that supported both.

I would be doing native work on Linux once everything was setup, but we deploy a bunch of Android POS hardware, and our MDM solution only has a Windows app (it uses ADB to install / configure the machine). Some days I’m setting them up all day and would prefer to use the Windows VM instead of having to dual boot.

In Windows both Outlook and Thunderbird can go to to the system tray when closed or minimized, and continue to run in the background without having to be an open window or sit on the bar. It also changes the icon when messages come in.

Dual boot is what I do now, but I end up spending all day in Windows, and everything gets out of sync (documents, etc), and I never boot back to Linux.

I’ll check out QEMU. I need multi monitor support, and USB pass-through at a minimum to be able to work with a USB software dongle and debug Android devices from Windows, so it gets a bit complicated. And I don’t want to rebuild my main work image, so migrating the virtual drive from VMWare to something else is the next step.

I need to pick a distro for the next run. I used / liked OpenSUSE the first time, and most things were pretty stable, but I could never get VMWare running. I went with Kubuntu next since there was solid Ubuntu support from VMWare, but overall it seems really unstable, especially with multiple monitors / KDE.

Thinking maybe just going with Debian this time might be the best route.

I’ve switched twice but keep having to fall back to Windows. About to take my third attempt.

My main issues relate to VMWare. The rest are small details that I’m sure I can work around with the right distro (I run 3 monitors and a GTX1080, so KDE stability has been weird).

VMWare is a real pain in Linux, and my main deal breaker, so I need to see if I can migrate to something else, as I work in a couple of Windows virtual machines all day.

Thanks for posting.

This is one of the minor pain points on my list for migrating from Windows.

My brother in law worked at the BMW plant and they weren’t supposed to have their phones on the floor at all.