I did almost this exact thing a few years ago and I've been super happy. Two points of advice:

1. Check hardware compatibility _before_ you order your laptop. Intel video drivers and wifi drivers are open source and reliable. Stay away from Broadcom, and unless you plan to do gaming, stay away from Nvidia (tho modern Ubuntu makes nvidia pretty darn easy). 2. Pick a DE (I recommend Gnome 3, but KDE is great too) and learn the shortcut keys. Expect a day or two of spinup time. If you go with Gnome, make use of the Gnome Tweak Tool and the super key shortcuts.

Good luck! This is exciting :-)

I switched at the beginning of college (oddly enough, before I decided to add a computer science degree or had ever written a line of code), and I really don't understand what all the fuss is about. I've stuck with ThinkPads for hardware compatibility, and I've always been 10x more productive on my machine than anyone I know. On top of that, I've been able to keep 90% of the same habits and config while taking my machine over the years from a prettier-than-Mac Gnome+Compiz setup to a barebones, personalized, blazing fast, low power keyboard-shortcut-driven Openbox setup. The key insight is that if almost ANYTHING about my machine doesn't perfectly fit me, I can make it fit me in about five minutes.

Frankly, I consider this table stakes for a competent OS and I don't understand why people put up with being deprived of this (especially devs): over the last decade I haven't been able to shake the feeling that almost everyone else in the personal computer market has been conned.

I completely agree. The beauty of my system now is that I can make it do whatever I want it to, and I never have to worry about somebody taking it away (open source lives forever. can't say the same about Win XP or old version of OSX). I also never worry about what the corporation behind my OS is doing with my data.

Because some of us have been spoiled with development environments like Smalltalk, Common Lisp IDEs, Delphi, ... with Visual Studio being one of the best.

I remember following KDevelop progress hoping that one day it could eventually match what I already had available in Borland and MS tools.

Thanks for the perspective: I haven't heard VS given as a reason before. It's probably a consequence of the bubbles I've been in, but for every dev I've ever met (incl everyone in my CS program), there wasn't any advantage to Windows for development and disadvantages everywhere you looked. This may be a consequence of the devs I know (esp the good ones) skewing towards having a CS background (though obviously most of them aren't computer scientists in industry).

(Of course none of this applies to personal computing, where I still don't understand Windows usage beyond the need for niche software).

I was on my 2nd CS year when Slackware 2.0 was released, and we had big boys UNIX on the department, like Aix and DG/UX.

Yet the majority of lab computers were running Windows 95/98.

UNIX was mostly used for the OS, compiler design and distributed computing classes.

Everything else, including graphics programming was on Windows.

> unless you plan to do gaming, stay away from Nvidia

Or any sort of GPU compute / machine learning. That is actually my primary reason for buying laptop with a dedicated Nvidia GPU - it sucks performance wise, that's to be expected, but at least I can play with both OpenCL and CUDA.

> unless you plan to do gaming, stay away from Nvidia

The newer AMD cards work very well with the mainline kernels and Mesa. (My desktop PC has an R9 Nano from 2015.) Haven't tried compute or Vulkan yet, though.

I'm in a similar predicament to OP. I prefer Linux in most cases, it's what I'm used to. But I need or would vastly prefer one or the other depending on what I'm doing. A VM is fine for just checking outlook..or using Skype for chat and things like that. But the second I need to use an IDE for Windows development, it's too slow to bear. Having better interchangeability between these two would make my life significantly better. Whether that be a stronger Linux subsystem for Windows, or a Windows subsystem for Linux.

Of course, I work at Microsoft. That being said, many devs I see are open to or enjoy using Linux--myself included. I think, and hope, we'll see continued growth in support for it. Though, I have little to no influence over such things.

There are some ways to improve VM performance. You could try to pre-create the disk volume instead of leaving it dynamic as it usually is, attach a partition directly, or move it to a different disk that'll not interfere with your other apps (my bigger home box has system and apps on one disk, VM volumes and network shares on another). If you do that, your performance hit for disk IO will be very close to zero. A modern CPU will usually not eat up more than 3% per virtualisation layer (at least under KVM). Beyond that, you can assign more cores to the virtual machine and see how it goes. Even a relatively humble i7 laptop has enough power to run Visual Studio with dignity for all but the craziest projects.

If we are talking about a beefy Xeon E5 workstation with 64 gigs of memory, you'll probably be able to assign more resources to the Windows VM than Visual Studio knows how to deal with.

How is the attitude/atmosphere internally at Microsoft towards people using a competing OS (Mac or Linux).

Does the group working on Windows OS feel alienated at all?

In my experience, pretty positive. I see Macs around campus frequently. In my team, people mostly use Windows, so there's definitely no alienation there. However, when people notice I mostly use Linux, I usually receive a chuckle for not using Windows--either out of irony or since we are highly encouraged to dogfood everything here. But that's usually the last I hear of it, so I don't think anyone sees anything wrong with it.

Not all VM host softwares are created equal. One of the other solutions out there may have higher performance for your needs. As a sibling comment said, there's ways to troubleshoot performance as well. With a modern system and the virtualization instructions baked into CPUs, most VMs should approach "near native" speeds.

How can we learn which ones are the best?

The difficult part is virtualization solutions aren't all optimal out of the box, so any evalution of them by someone new to a given product might be skewed.

I'd look at what the big names are, especially in paid versions as they have their business on the line, and check youtube or blogs for performance tweaks or maximizing performance, and see what those who use it day in and day out have found. There aren't any real benchhmark sites or articles I'd recommend, as it can be hard to distinguish unbiased reporting from advertising.

Personally, I would give the VMware products a trial (most have 60 day unlimited use options), but I'm also biased having been a VMware VCP5. Anecdotally, their performance (when set up properly) was better than when I ran VirtualBox or Xen.

Make sure all virtualization extension options are enabled in your BIOS, first off. Second, save some cores and RAM for your host machine. More cores is not always better when it comes to VMs, but this applies more to multiple VMs on a machine and CPU scheduling issues. Third, turn off any power saving features in the host software or guest VM. Things like CPU C states can be a silent performance killer. Fourth, make use of whatever metrics or utilities the software provides to see at the host and guest levels where the bottlenecks are. The guest may think it's waiting on CPU while the host is busy paging memory blocks on disk.

Outstanding! Thank you.

> But the second I need to use an IDE for Windows development, it's too slow to bear.

This very much depends on your machine. For example, I have an office machine running an older i7 with 16 GB of RAM. I give my VM's 6 cores and 8 GB of ram and I don't run into the issues you describe.

I also precreate the disk (instead of using dynamic) and shut off things that tend to be I/O intensive in Visual Studio, but once done I've not noticed a performance difference between it and native.

Microsoft must hate the dual boot to Linux idea. Once you experience a modern Linux, you'll eventually look at that NTFS partition and decide it'd just be better used as free disk space.

For the times you need Windows, there's always VirtualBox.

i was in the same boot as OP, ordered maxed out XPS15 whiped windows from them and installed latest version of ubuntu. but i had problems with 4K display, hdpi support in ubuntu is shit if you want different dislplays with different dpis, and wayland is still not really production ready. And then is the support for GPU, drivers for nvidia, it would get so hot that i could almost burn my hands.

so i returned the XPS and ordered a new MacBook Pro. Sure touchbar is a gimick, and i dont like new keyboard even after so much time but its better then the alternative.

XPS machines look nice, but I'd recommend the Dell Latitude line for those who plan to potentially use Linux. The compatibility is just on a different level, and they are pretty nice work horses hardware wise.

Latitudes lack that infinity display, sure, but at least I'm almost always using an external monitor anyway. Some of the other features are more subjective, but I also like the matte screen, better keyboard, camera on lid upper edge, support for a docking station, and so on.

From my experience, both KDE Plasma 5 and GNOME 3 work pretty well on high DPI displays, not so much Unity 7.

> KDE Plasma 5 and GNOME 3 work pretty well on high DPI displays

Not so well on displays with non-integer scale factor (1.25-1.5x).

I've somehow managed Plasma & Qt apps to have acceptably sanely sized windows decorations and widgets, but failed to e.g. teach the browsers to calculate sizes correctly (e.g. make a block with `width: 50mm` to have correct size).

Biggest GNU/Linux problem is having way too much of the completely different solutions for the roughly the same thing that can't interoperate with each other.

by dual booting and using Linux for your hardcore development your basically ceding that Windows sucks at this. I agree honestly it's sad that Windows is not POSIX compliant, why can't I run bash, GIT, ssh, and a decent package manager on Windows? that will be it's downfall because the hardcore devs are all on Linux and OS X

No, I am ceding that it's easier to develop linux apps on linux. "hardcore devs" on OSX have been deluding themselves for years, myself included. If I would have just buckled down with Linux, I would actually be much further ahead. macOS is really only good for iOS and macOS... nothing else runs it.

There is a world of Windows software that is not POSIX and has viable business opportunity. I've been neglecting that because "OSX rules! POSIX or bust!" mentality. I am going to change my mindset.

Hardcore graphics programming devs are on Windows.

Those doing games, yes. Those of us doing movies are mostly on Linux. Lots of sci-viz folks are also on Linux.

Not only games, movies and sci-viz rendering have little to do with UI/UX design considerations and tooling for consumer applications.

Which is why GNOME and KDE to this day, still need to try to advocate to get more UI/UX developers involved into their projects.

Really? I thought video/post-production people were mostly on Macs these days. What are the standard software stacks for doing FX?

We're getting off-topic here, but see http://www.vfxplatform.com/

RHEL/Centos is probably the most common distro used.

No, everybody is on Amiga :)

As OP mentioned, he probably doesn't want to turn off his system.

This is problem I have with a dual boot system, even with the ability to save state. Unless I absolutely have to, I'd rather keep running macOS's

With the problems I see on the mac forums regarding the new MBP's, I don't think turning off the system is going to be much of an issue.

That said, I understand not wanting to restart in order to get work done. However, I am looking at it with the perspective that I will be able to fully focus on the tasks at hand (ala Deep Work by Cal Newport), in a distraction free environment.

What problems specifically? I'm not following closely, so a summary would be nice :)