She kind of likes the Linux set up, but she really doesn’t want to give up things like (and this is an immediate issue), Turbotax. From what I find in searches, it doesn’t seem to play well with Wine, but it might be OK if I ran it in a virtual Windows machine. But don’t I still need to buy Windows in order to set one of those up? And is there an advantage to running it in a VM, other than not having to reboot into the OS?
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Hey. Reasons for a VM:
1) you can backup the entire VM as one file
2) when winbloze blows up (and you know it will and does) from virii, licence issues, etc, etc, you can fire up the backup. Also, the crash didn’t mess up your other running stuff
3) you can have one vm just for turbotax. other stuff won’t mess it up
4) you can have a different VM for games (with different drivers, etc, etc,)
5) when hackers get into your windows VM, you can have your banking info (or browser) on another box (the secure linux one).
6) the VM will run on new Hardware when you get it. No muss, no fuss.
Definitely do this.
Also, have you considered using the online turbotax? I’m not endorsing that, but it is an option.
OK, but in order to do so, I still need to purchase a copy of Windows, right?
As for on-line Turbotax, she’s already purchased it, but not yet installed.
Funny thing, Fred. I’ve been using Windows since ’95 came out, and I’ve yet to have a meltdown, or any other major issue. Go figure.
Rand, from what I’ve read during my research about VMs (once played with the idea of getting an Intel Mac but wanted to keep certain Windows apps) you are obliged to buy a copy of Windows if you don’t already own a disk.
OK, but I’d have to do that if I did dual boot as well. The main disadvantage that I see is that it would take more resources to run both OS’s simultaneously, but that might not be a problem for special apps, like Turbotax, or iTunes.
Rand, as long as you’re not doing something heavy-duty like trying to play games in the host OS and the VM at the same time, any decently-powered machine should be OK. Just to run TurboTax? An i3+ and 4GB+ of RAM should have perfectly cromulent performance, although with only 4GB RAM I’d probably recommend 32-bit Windows if that’s doable.
I’ve used Turbo tax web edition on Linux, worked just fine.
OK, so only cost is what was wasted by buying Windows edition?
It’s not all that resource intensive. If you’ve got an i5 or better CPU, and 8 GB of RAM or more, you shouldn’t have any problems with running Windows in a VM for Turbotax. If you’re doing something really intensive you might need more memory, and you wouldn’t want to be using something that’s graphics intensive inside the VM. iTunes, may it rot in hell, is just a pig wherever it runs. Reading audio CDs from within VirtualBox wasn’t possible the last time I checked, but that may have been fixed. I need to check on that, because running iTunes is the main use my wife still has for a dual-boot Windows installation. She would dearly love being able to just fire up a VM instead of rebooting every time she runs iTunes.
Short answers:
1) It will run well in a Virtual Machine. I recommend Virtual Box.
2) You need to own a valid windows license. If you don’t have one, you need to buy one. Perhaps you know someone with access to the Microsoft employee’s store?
3) There are great advantages to running things like TT in a VM.
4) Don’t worry about performance issues unless you plan to play games inside the VM, and you have a wimpy machine. I do ALL of my “real” work inside virtual machines, including developing and debugging software.
Bonus answer, which might be irrelevant:
You can rent virtual machines per hour from Amazon AWS. They are phenomenally cheap for the wimpier virtual machines. I run a (linux) server and it cost me 57 cents last month for my server. 50 cents flat rate because they host my domain on their DNS, 6 cents taxes, and 1 penny in usage fees. Windows licensing seems to make that more expensive, but it may still be worth it. (…Some time later…) On further investigation, Amazon provides Amazon WorkSpaces. For $25/mo they’ll give you a completely configured persistent Windows virtual machine that you can install your own apps on, access from anywhere, and that is backed up every 12 hours. You only pay for what you use, and you can cancel at any time, and you can have as many workspaces as you can pay for.
Longer answer:
I run all of my Windows software in virtual machines. I have one Windows license I use for this, and I only ever run one Windows VM at a time. I don’t know if your existing windows license will work for you. It’s probably tied to your computer (this would be the usual nasty IMO illegal crap MS pulls with their licenses. They only sell licenses cheap to manufacturers that install Windows and only Windows on all the machines they make. Release one Linux machine and suddenly they have to pay absurd prices for all licenses for similar configurations).
VirtualBox lets you make snapshots of a virtual machine, and you can jump around the tree of snapshots as you need. So, I have a clean install snapshotted and then branch off that for each client when I do development work. This keeps everything contained and confidential. Backing up the VM data files is a perfect backup of everything, and I can and do move VMs between machines when I upgrade, and from my desktop to my laptop and back when I travel. I’ve run the same VM image on a MacBook, Ubuntu Linux laptop, Gentoo Linux desktop, and a co-worker’s Windows desktop.
Whenever I do something scary, I snapshot the VM, and if something goes wrong, I just revert back to the snapshot and delete the current version of the VM.
I also do this for the Linux development environments that I have built for the various embedded CPUs I develop for. These have the added advantage that I can give a copy of the VM to my client when I am done, and they have a guaranteed-working development environment specifically for their project that will run on just about any hardware, and in the meantime, backs up onto a microSD. 🙂
So, yeah, I think virtual machines are the bee’s knees. 🙂 I hope this info somehow helps you. Please feel free to email me if you have any questions.
I use Win7 in the Bootcamp VM on a 2012 MacBook, it works fine. I think the windows license cost $70.
Eventually I also bought Parallels so that I could run both at once, still no problems.
As Larry said, a modern mobo setup with lots of ram and Linux distro should be fine with a vm.
I think you can run a windows instance for free for a month, haven’t tried it myself.
BTW, it’s the main work computer and I won’t allow any Adobe products on it, on either OS. I’ve an old un-networked windows box for projects that need Acrobat or Flash.
Like other people said use the Turbo Tax web edition. Yes if you want to run Windows under a VM you need a Windows license. If you run your applications under Wine, on the other hand, you don’t need a Windows license.
I know some people can do their personal finances fine with something like GnuCash but I don’t know if that would work for her or not.
It is usually easier to do the Linux transition by keeping Windows around and switching apps to FLOSS and web based first than going cold turkey like this.
She’s been using Turbotax in Windows for years.