Best way to run Windows 8.X: In a virtual machine?

[Capricorny]

Greetings, Capricorny; two questions for you along these lines:

1. Is it not possible to actually use Windows 8 or 8.1 as is and
mount some Linux system as a Virtual machine and ignore all the
uefi and secure boot stuff?

2. My reading of Klaus K's approach to Windows 8 is that he will work
with uefi as a useful upgrade, but wants nothing to do with secure
boot. If so, seems to me that only allows legacy bios operation
as the means of mounting Knoppix on (most or all) Windows 8 machines.
Is this your understanding? If so, this is not a useful dual boot
approach in my book.

Hi utu!

1. Sure we could, and most will probably go by that route. Could even be rather attractive for quite a few people to escape from being coerced into The Windows Way
But if I am not forced to run Win 8 natively, why should I let it loose on my good and innocent computers? It is also a question of resource management, new 64 bit systems with 16+ GB RAM can take on some serious tasks - how to approach that as efficiently and flexibly as possible? Methinks not by leaving the native resource handling to Win 8. But of course I may be wrong.

2. I haven't looked a lot into it, but yes, it could seem so. The real question here is, if there is at present any useful dual boot approach at all. I also must ask: Why bother? The whole concept of "hard disk install" seems like an anachronism to me for ordinary, non-server use.

For non-server use, I really can't see anything being able to beat the simple "compressed image union persistent image" paradigm of Knoppix et al, running other things in VMs. On the contrary, wrapping it all up this way has a lot of advantages, and whenever you need to store more than a select few GBs, they should probably not be integrated with your running system proper anyway. One main reason everything is still geared towards "hard disk install" as the "real" thing is of course that it is the easiest, most important and efficient form of vendor lock-in available, and most vendors, Linux distro makers inclusive, want that.

Of course, M$ has seen and felt this coming, which is why we get this "security" nonsense. With the advent of 64 bits CPUs, 4+ GB RAM and USB3, it became perfectly feasible to just boot and run a PC from a USB port, and with SSDs, running end-user applications in VMs is perfectly acceptable for most normal uses. This is of course horrible for OS vendors. Maybe for hardware vendors too. But I think there is a real conflict between M$'s insistence on complete control over the PCs and the hardware vendors' need for volume sales - which is facilitated by making PCs as versatile tools as possible, contrary to the direction of development dictated by Win 8.X.