The last couple of weeks of my time on PC has been spent messing around with the Stanford Folding@home (Thread) program and optimizing how it runs. While spending time doing that I came across some posts mentioning that a linux dist could do it better (at least with the SMP [CPU] client). I've always been curious about how linux worked but stayed away as I always had the idea that it was for the more computer savvy (which is somewhat true) and I really had no problem with the pre-installed windows OS on any PC that I bought or more recently putting it on one that I built my self. Prior to this I knew a little about running an OS in a virtual machine (a friends brother did it on a mac for windows) and decided to go this route. Virtual Machine Program: VMware Player I settled on VMware because it was free and anything I read really seemed like a toss up between the few free ones. None really stood out as a clear winner. Next was choosing the Linux distro that I wanted to start with. I narrowed it down to Mint 14 after reading a few websites and browsing around the mint site to see what it was all about and really how it looked. The virtual machine was fairly easy to set up and if I messed something up it took all of about 10 minutes to delete the OS install and start from scratch with no harm done. I created a new 100 Gb partition on my WD Caviar Black just for the virtual machine. Since I was going to be folding with it quite a bit a didn't want to chew through the life of my SSDs too quickly. The last few days have been interesting as I haven't had to learn how to use a new OS in....... ever? Thankfully the linux community is pretty knowledgeable and any problems I have had have generally been answered somewhere with step by step instructions on how to fix. File structure is totally different than windows and how programs are installed/searched for is pretty cool. So far I am really enjoying the experience. For the next little while I will likely spend the majority of the time using my computer from within the virtual machine. The one downside of using the virtual machine is that it doesn't use my GTX 670 and has some sort of software accelerated graphics option. I don't really understand exactly how it works >.< All I know is that I would need to physically install the OS to a partition instead of running as a virtual machine if I wanted to make use of dedicated NVIDIA drivers for the 670. Screeny of running in windowed VMware. Fullscreen VMware. I have the Virtual machine set up so that it has access to 3Gb of RAM and all 4 cores of the CPU for now. It also has access to my storage portion of my hard drive so I can access music and photos within the virtual machine.
I dont use Linux on a daily basis, but I would like to say that in my opinion VMware is very much the clean winner for business virtualization. Most use Citrix instead, but that is much harder to manage in the majority of areas, costs more, and doesnt have the newest features. Also, if you had the right (business level) motherboard chipset, and possibly an AMD graphics card but I am not positive on that requirement, then you would be able to use your GTX670's hardware within the virtual machine. VMware has that capability on specific chipsets.
It's not the worst thing in the world not being able to access the video cards. The OS is still pretty snappy since it is so light weight. Aside from games not being compatible with linux I could easily see myself dropping windows all together. I spent pretty much all day yesterday solely using the linux VM and didn't find any features missing that I desired (other than gaming). One of the things I think is really cool is the different environments you can set up and switch between quite easily. NOt something I have used as of yet but I could see it coming in handy when doing school work. The software programs (Software manager + synaptic package manager) make looking for programs a breeze. No need to dick around with a web browser and download then install the file. Just search, and install automatically. If you know the package name you can bypass those programs all together and just use the terminal to complete the entire download and install. I can easily see where time can be saved using this method. One complaint I have seen is that you don't really get to choose where and how things are installed. They have specific folders they are told to go to and you can't really alter that. Not sure how I feel about it but it does work. Just something else to get used to when using an new operating system. Windows ways are so ingrained in me it can be hard to wrap my head around some of the ways things are handled. Not at all difficult to use once you get a feel for everything. Just have to put the time in. If people are curious about linux I would recommend using the method I described above to test it out. I would also use the distribution of linux I chose. I may in the coming weeks check out some other to see how they compare. I think it's cool how there are so many that go about things in a slightly different way but still use the same basic OS. Refreshing change from windows I suppose. That being said I would still like to get my hands on windows 8. I've had a chance to mess around with it on my girlfriends new laptop and my initial impressions are positive.
Which desktop environment did you choose for Linux Mint 14? It looks like you've chosen the MATE environment, which is great. However, you may get better performance using the Xfce environment. It is a little lighter on resources which might help you in your folding escapades. It's not going to be a night and day difference by any means, but it's still worth the expirement since it's so easy to setup. Who knows, you may even start to prefer that environment. I will say though, GPU acceleration for folding can dramatically increase your return on investment if done right. You'd also get better performance running linux natively instead of in a virtual machine, but I think you mentioned that already. I have been using linux a lot lately. My only gripe is the incompatiblity with most modern day games. You can usually get it to work in time (using wine), but the performance and graphics quality usually isn't there, so it's not really worth the effort if you've got a working Windows box. On my desktop I have Windows 7 installed, but I do all of my web browsing in a linux virtual machine, running Xubuntu 12.10 (if you can't tell, I love the xfce environment). I've also got the same version of Xubuntu installed directly on my laptop, with Windows in a virtual machine instead. The laptop is super fast and stable, but like any computer, it's not perfect! There are small bugs here and there depending on what applications you use and the hardware in your machine.
It's actually the cinammon 1.6 environment that I chose which, from what I gather, is slightly more resource intensive. I haven't noticed it being a problem at all. I generally have a F@H client up in windows for the gpu and one running in the VM for the CPU. I ran CPU in both a couple time and didn't really notice a drop in performance on either. I'll give the other environments a look after a I my bearings in cinammon. It is slightly easier to jump into this from windows from what I read than the others
In the future I expect many games to be made compatible with Linux. Just in the past few years we have already seen more games available for Mac as well, which means those things can be much more easily ported to a Linux OS, but also because Valve is doing such a strong push into Linux. With Valve being the #1 game distributor by a HUGE margin on the PC, as they push one direction many game companies are sure to follow. In fact, some have already signed on to start doing Linux compatible games. Blizzard has even strongly hinted they will go that way too. So hopefully soon we wont have to use Windows for anything.
Use linux all day everyday at work (System Engineer) here at SUNY Potsdam. We have hundreds of servers running either RHEL, Centos 6.x or Scientific 6.x in a KVM env or bare-metal servers.
I use an XBMC linux implementation every day and UnRAID for a server backup. Its the only two computers I have that dont crash on a semi-regular basis. Just sayin..