Thinkpads Forum

I'm about to buy a new laptop. For years I have run Linux VMs on Windows 10 / T430s but I'm looking to turn that inside out and have a Linux laptop in which I run Windows as a VM. I'd appreciate any comments from those who've done something similar.

I'm considering buying a P series with Linux pre-installed and then running Windows 10 PRO, sometimes, and Windows Server 20xx, other times, under a Linux Hypervisor.

My current thoughts are "ThinkPad P15v Gen 3 AMD with Linux" with 2TB of SSD and 32GB of RAM. I really want 64GB of RAM but I can't specify that in the configurator, I'm checking at the moment but it does seem I can get it to ship with a single slot empty so presumably be able to put another 32GB in once I have the machine.

I've no opinions about the hypervisor other than https://www.qemu.org/ seems to be commonly used.

As I say if you have experience of a similar setup I'd be interested to hear your thoughts ... in particular running Windows under a linux hypervisor

I ran Windows in Linux (I think via VirtualBox) for building software packages. This was a few years ago on X201. Configuration was usable, I'm sure there is a performance penalty but it was not noticeable enough in daily use.

Hi Elka - Thanks, good to hear. Makes me a little more comfortable about the idea.

I run windows, BSD and MAC OS as virtual machines under Slackware with no real issues.
it really comes in handy when treing to quickly walk someone through something on another OS.
If you have tried running linux as a virtual machine under windows its really pretty similar performance wise.
so it depends what you plan to do with it.
running games will be difficult even with GPU acceleration (Which can be a pain to set up)
but most day to day tasks work fine with little or no issues, especially if you have a reasonable amount of RAM.
most (But not all) linux distros and desktop environments use less RAM than windows too so you may even see a slight performance increase depending on what you have.

I use windows 10 and 7 on KVM/Qemu, without problem, as it's normal as it's. Even with spice/rhel it's better.