I'm not sure where you're getting that information from but most distro's don't come with restricted drivers, it has something to do with copyright and how FGLRX and nVidia's priorietary drivers aren't open source. With respect to open source drivers, they're pretty bad for everything outside of 2D to be completely honest.
I already listed some distributions coming with proprietary video drivers preloaded. You can run 3D applications with those on a Live CD, smoothly.
There are
hundreds of distributions lying around, not all of them stick with purist
FOSS philosophies. Many simply aren't crazy about being all open source by default.
As to performance, again, both 2D and 3D rendering on free drivers running natively are faster than when handled by a VM.
Things will be smoother on a cold-booted
Porteus (as an example) than on its VM counterpart.
Video performance is kind of a major thing for home use.
That depends on your hardware and the open source driver, but I would put them on par because at least VirtualBox can accelerate 3D, but once again I wouldn't be using a VM if I was doing 3D.
I wouldn't put them on par.
Definitely, you wouldn't be doing 3D within your average pc VM, which video support sucks hairy dinosaurs in general, regardless of loading proprietary drivers.
Also, it's not like there are hundreds of free video drivers ready for load by default on current distros. For amd gpus, for instance, you'll seldom use something other than xf86-video-ati (context: free drivers - just clarifying, you know).
Don't expect to play HD video on OpenSource radeon drivers either. A great example is my old Dell laptop with a 2.1Ghz Penryn in it. It has a dedicated Mobility Radeon HD 3650, FGLRX removed support for legacy hardware and when I try to even play 720P it struggles when it used to do hardware decoding 1080p without an issue under proprietary drivers when they worked, so there really is a huge difference between the two, even more so if you want hardware acceleration of any kind (which is very helpful for HD video).
Seriously? I play high bitrate 1080p videos on my 7640g (APU-based laptop radeon graphics) with open source drivers. And it's pretty gimmicky hardware.
Many Linux users don't even bother installing proprietary video drivers if they don't perform heavy 3D tasks.
If you have 512MB of memory free, you're probably okay so I don't see how that's an issue. It comes down to rule #1 of virtualization, don't over-provision more resources than the host has.
I just pointed out you will have all your memory for a single OS on a cold Live boot.
On the other hand, in a VM session... Why would someone over-provision the guest more resources than the host has? Is it even possible? Tis crazeh.
512MB of ram free? If you're talking about modern distros and applications, it seems you love swapping during extensive tryouts.
I've worked with Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, CentOS, RHEL (at work,) and if you want to include Unix platforms, throw FreeBSD into the mix. I find it insulting that you're assuming how much I know when I've done nothing of the sort for you. I might want to throw out there that I used to be a linux system admin and I'm currently a lead developer who does most of his work in Linux, so I would be careful to make any assumptions about my knowledge. I don't do that for other people and you shouldn't as well. Lets stick to the facts.
God, how insulting was that! Maybe you didn't spot your implying about my lack of knowledge. Implicit "misassumptions" won't always attract docile answers, beware.
I'm sure you are great at your job. I believe you. Nice to know that, also. A public display of facts relevant for some of the background information we can share in this discussion, but not for all:
It seems you're not the greatest authority in the current huge variety of forked distributions, also as to what's prepackaged in them.
Such assumption mustn't harm your major Linux/developing skills in any way. We rather know how to manage the base Linux systems than all the specific software each forked distribution bears.
I do want to point out a couple things with your pro/con list.
I don't see how you can say that because short of SteamOS (I've never used it, so I can't say what it has or can do,) but most distro's don't come with restricted drives and open source drives are slow and terribly inefficient, so if you have an older computer, this isn't going to hold true.
That underlined part isn't a specially good statement coming from an experienced Linux user. Nor true.
And if we happen to extend the same line of thinking to foss drivers in general (beyond video), it gets more ridiculous than this discussion in itself (I admit
).
I am particularly curious about and minimally experienced in the
universe of distributions so that I could learn that base distros, or just "most distros" (as you said) can be a rule of thumb, but not the rule for what's packaged into each and all distros.
I never said most distros have proprietary video drivers preloaded. I said many do. And we can use them for Live CDs.
As a side note: Mint and its "parent", Ubuntu, come with all broadcom wi-fi firmwares and drivers. Debian doesn't, because of its FOSS philosophy, rendering some wireless devices useless until necessary software is properly installed and configured. Just one interesting detail among a number of others.
You missed the part where VM disks can use a thing called snapshots, so if you do something and want to revert it to the way it was, you just revert to an old snapshot of the disk, turn the machine on, and you're done. On top of that, if you're using a VM, it's not like you can't do something while it installs. You don't need to sit there and watch the progress bar. Also, if you have the ISO on your tower, I have a feeling that installing from HDD/SSD to HDD/SSD will be a lot faster than imaging a flash drive.
Very true, but technically you're not touching your main system with a VM either, the only thing you're doing is using a little bit of space on the filesystem you already have. The point of using a VM is to
isolate it from the host. That isolation gives you better security than a LiveCD ever will. At least if a VM crashes, the host is still there and you only have to reboot the VM and rebooting a VM is a lot faster than rebooting from a flash drive. Not to mention if Linux is hosed, you can easily revert to a prior snapshot.
Yes, very true, but even if persistence is setup, most flash drives write even slower than they read. It's one of those things where the user better be patient.
Writing an ISO to a flash drive is always faster than installing the OS, except when using a truly horrible, below average flash drive. Yeah, isolation prevent recklessness, gr8 for noobs. As with all these and those matters I couldn't possibly have conceived on this Earth, thanks big time.
On to VMs!
I personally find this a big plus when you're trying to learn how do something, even more so if you're doing things that can screw Linux up. This is one of those cases where between this and snapshotting, you can learn a lot very easily and since you have a browser in the host handy, you can figure out why something doesn't work very quickly in comparison.
Just for clarification, there is no need to reboot the host. The VM will undoubtably get rebooted several times.
Good remark. If you didn't clarify that, I would have thought that one had to reboot the host OS in order to reboot the guest OS or load another guest etc. Just a very obvious misunderstanding here. Snapshottig is also news to me... Thanks.
That's not a requirement. This also implies that you can't run a LiveCD from a VM using an attached flash drive which you can. You also can put the VM disk image anywhere you want. For example, I could put it on my SSD RAID, my HDD RAID, the 500GB drive attached, an external hard drive, a network drive, a flash drive, etc. The location of the disk doesn't matter, that's my point.
Nice that you brought up it was not a requirement. Because I didn't.
"Run it from your main storage" isn't equivalent to
only running from your main storage. Very factual. Great remark.
I can't quite make out why you thought I implied one can't run a LiveCD from a VM. Take a look at the VM cons - I stated otherwise, only implying running a Live CD on a VM can be silly:
If one really wants to run a Live CD, a logical first choice is writing the ISO to some medium for a regular boot. But if one craves to run a Live CD from a VM, then loading the image as a guest OS will do the job.
Don't placate to me. I will say I come off as insulting but it's just me trying to be direct.
I'm not quite sure what you're talking about here. Most VMs will automatically setup defaults for you depending on the OS you're installing. Also configuration doesn't take that long, so I'm not sure how you can call this a "con". In fact resource limiting in VMs is probably one of the reasons why cloud servers are a thing now, so I wouldn't exactly call this a shortcoming of VMs but rather a strength and since it makes defaults for you, it's not like an unexperienced enduser will have trouble with this aspect.
Here you go again some homebrew tryouts nosing into cloud server business...
Oh, trying to be direct isn't much different from implying insults, so no worries.
From your whole paragraph talking about that particular matter, it turns out you understood what I was talking about. And you converted me. That's a big pro, not a con from any perspective.
You install it once and you're done. Assuming the user uses snapshots, there should be no need to ever need to install it again since you can revert the drive to any prior snapshot. So while it takes more time, you do it once and never again. You also don't need to leave a flash drive plugged into your tower as well. Also if you're going with a LiveCD, you're not installing anything so that's a false equivalency and if feels more like baiting. Also, if you're installing a VM, there is a good bet the installer ISO is on a physical disk which means installing will go a lot faster than you think.
Again, as I said right above, you got me.
Can't argue with the underlined stuffs. Not even if I just want to boot into a full blown OS in around 5 minutes (considering writing ~2GB Persistence that can hold configuration and anything extra you install/save on your Live CD).
Writing 0.7-3GB ISOs to flash drives will always be faster than installing and configuring the same distros on VMs.
I find FGLRX to be very easy to install for supported hardware. I do find multi-monitor (3 displays) to be a little strange because of how my own tower is configured but it's not like most people have such a setup and I would call restricted drivers half decent at this point.
FGLRX sure is an easy install. And if you pick a distro in which it's preloaded, there's no need to install. Anyway even proprietary video drivers can perform far from ideal when handled by a VM.
Regardless, VMs are wondrous. I love and use them a lot. Seriously. I even did the silly thing and loaded some Live CD ISOs on them. Sorry, I'm a placater.
Also, I often boot humble Live CDs and I'm pretty happy with such habit. I enjoy trying new distributions like this.
Nobody is bound to leave their flash drives plugged 4eva whateva reezn. Except if they'll die otherwise. Now you can imagine some serious implications I still didn't...
thought for foods
