I’m currently using Windows 10 on my Framework and I wanted to start running my own Weather Research and Forecasting(WRF) Model, but I found out that I need to use Linux. I did some research and it seems that Linux Mint is the most friendly distro for beginners. I plan on doing a dual boot off of a 250GB SSD expansion card and keep Windows 10 on my main SSD. Due to hearing some horror stories from other people about their laptop getting hot when they put it to sleep, I use hibernate instead when closing the lid or pressing the power button. I have a heavy course load and involved in a lot of projects where turning the laptop completely off is tough, since I feel like I’m on call all the time. Is there any chance I’m going to mess up my laptop if I have hibernate for Windows when I try to dual boot Linux? I’m new to Linux and anything with computer software and I haven’t been able to find a clear answer online.
If you just need linux for a particular application, you might try WSL2. You can get a pretty standard Ubuntu environment that way, and it will save you having to dual boot. You could consider other virtual machine solutions too.
I’d be worried about using a USB drive as a system partition – a USB interface has lower throughput than a proper disk. If you know you’ll be using both OS-es regularly, it makes more sense to give each a partition on your internal SSD. With WSL2, this would essentially be the case, except that the linux file system would live inside a file on the windows file system somewhere.
If you keep your disks entirely separate, hibernating/booting into another operating system should be fine, but mounting the file system of another, hibernated OS is a recipe for disaster (it should be fine if the disk is properly unmounted from the other OS).
Running multiple virtual machines (as you’d do with WSL2) costs more memory, so if you find it’s not meeting the performance you’re looking for, you could reconsider dual boot, or wholesale transition to linux.
Running your own WRF can be taxing on the CPU with using so much data and trying to output it as a model. Would a virtual machine be able to run such a hard task? I have a friend who runs his off an external ssd and it works fine for him. It takes several hours of compiling that’s why I ask.
WSL2 is not the same as running a virtual Linux machine on top of Windows 10. As I understand it, the stack looks like this:
Windows 10 // WSL2
Microsoft Hypervisor
Hardware (CPU etc.)
So both Win10 and Linux are essentially running on the same layer, with the Hypervisor below distributing hardware resources. From what I heard the overhead for running WSL2 vs native Linux should be as little as a few percent.
One thing to note: WSL2 on Windows 10 does not natively support GUI applications, only command line. While there are workarounds, you might wanna try Windows 11 if you’ll be using WSL2 heavily. In Win11 Linux Apps with Graphical Interfaces can be run out of the box with WSL2 as far as I know.