I am currently using a dual boot system because I found that while Minecraft can be installed in Linux, it doesn’t seem to run as well as in Windows. I’m not prepared to change this until I can be certain that Minecraft will run as well if I install Windows inside of Linux and load MC there. I administer a family Minecraft server (purchased from a server provider, so not hosted on my computer), so it’s important that it run well for me. My question: is it likely to tax my system resources if I load Windows inside my Linux installation?
Hello PrettyGranny,
Running any OS or program on any computer is going to tax that system’s resources. If you allot 4 GB (or more) of RAM to Windows on a Windows machine, it’s also likely to need that on a Linux machine, or on a virtual machine running Windows on top of Linux. However, some of the overhead you had on the Windows only machine is now being handled by Linux, but requiring less overhead under Linux. So that kind of dual situation machine would need RAM and video/audio resources sufficient to handle both the Linux needs and the Windows needs. Since Linux takes far fewer resources than Windows, you can allot more resources to Windows than to Linux, since Windows requires more resources. To learn if it will satisfy your needs, you’ll need to set up virtual machine (VM) for Windows under Linux, giving it the RAM it would typically use when running on a Windows only machine, while still having several GBs of RAM for Linux and the Linux VM, and determine if it meets your needs. For optimum performance, you might need to add more RAM to your pc.
I decided to give it a try. I have VMWare Player installed, and followed instructions to install Windows 10 Home edition. I believe I have 16 G of RAM, so I set the Windows allocation to 8 G. When it came time to run it, though, it is powered off and will not power on. Instead, when I try to power it on, VMWare Player closes. I edited the settings to set the RAM allocation back to 4G, but it didn’t make a difference. What would cause this?