I'd like to set up a Windows VM in VirtualBox and would like opinions as to what is the best Linux distro as far as lowest system resources while still meeting my requirements. The VM will be the only thing the users interact with. I'm only running this as a VM to have snapshots to quickly get back to previous statesthis runs some very finicky software that constantly breaks itself, so clicking a few times to be back to two days ago is huge.
In short, this should be dead simple for a user who just needs to get in, do their work, and get out.
So, what distro do you all recommend? I'm not savvy enough yet to know if I could accomplish this by just installing a CLI-only distro, if I'd need a window manager, or if I'd need a full desktop environment. If the latter, Lubuntu LTS or maybe Debian Stable seem logical. All advice appreciated.
- Must be a stable or LTS distro that will just work
- Must be able to easily get into the VM. The users will expect to turn on the machine and have it boot into Windows or, at most, to have to type one command or click a couple times to be into Windows.
- Must run Windows in a full-screen mode. Ideally it would be very difficult to switch to the Linux environment.
- Must be reliable when it comes to hardware sharing. I'm thinking USB and Ethernet, mostly (see next)
- The Windows VM should always have access to the LAN and Internet and if I need to use NAT it must pass along TeamViewer requests to Windows.
In short, this should be dead simple for a user who just needs to get in, do their work, and get out.
So, what distro do you all recommend? I'm not savvy enough yet to know if I could accomplish this by just installing a CLI-only distro, if I'd need a window manager, or if I'd need a full desktop environment. If the latter, Lubuntu LTS or maybe Debian Stable seem logical. All advice appreciated.