Hi Patrick
On 13/09/18 00:11, Patrick Wigmore wrote:
Hi Tim,
...my son has been told he needs to download Visual Studio 2017 onto
a Windows PC...
Are there any options other than spending several hundred pounds on
a new PC to run this bloatware for compiling programs.
MonoDevelop is probably the closest equivalent to Visual Studio on
Linux, supporting most of the same languages and libraries (or drop in
replacements; i.e. Mono instead of .NET).
For console programs or those using third party libraries for graphics
(e.g. MonoGame) it's more or less equivalent. However, last I looked,
the GUI builder in MonoDevelop only supports GTK GUIs, unlike Visual
Studio. So, for GUI programs, you probably want to stick to one IDE or
the other.
I've run Visual Studio on Windows 7 in VirtualBox, and it is usable
with 4GB RAM and VT-x hardware acceleration. It is one of the slower
applications though. It takes ages to load on real hardware too, but
once it's going it feels a bit more responsive.
This is running on a dual core Celeron N3060 1.6GHz with 8GB RAM (Debian
9). I've devoted 4GB to the virtual machine and best performance is with
both cores available to the virtual machine.
And of course if you're not booting Windows every day, the first thing
it's going to do when you boot up your virtual machine is run Windows
Update in the background and bog itself down for several minutes doing
whatever it is that Windows Update does that takes so much time and
effort.
Well, that's a real revelation. Looking at the service host processes
under the Windows task manager, there are a bunch of update processes.
After 15 minutes or so these are done and the machine becomes usable -
thanks!
Cheers
Tim
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