Dual booting Linux distro on a Macbook Air- for programming purposes

[thecodeinnovator]

I have bought a Macbook Air recently, version 7,2.
for Programming and linux based work i think it would be better to dual boot linux alongside macOS in my macbook air.
Please help with any suggestions.

and do you think it was a good choice ?

Yes I thought i was a fool.
but now im going to get backlash if i say this computer is not suitable for me.

any suggestion for dual booting is fine.

PLEASE HELP !

[kbw]

It might be better to install a Linux disto in a VM rather than dual booting. That way you can run both systems concurrently and they can communicate over the network interface.

[thecodeinnovator]

will it be enough to learn linux programming to enable me to learn other things related to linux based system management.

and is it good that i bought a macbook air ?
thanks again
appreciate your time !

regarding VM - any good/noteworthy vm's ?

[TheIdeasMan]

Hi,

So what do you mean by Linux programming? That could be Unix shell scripting with something like bash; or it could mean Programming in C with the built in system calls; or Linux kernel programming?

I am not familiar with Mac, but isn't the kernel the same as Linux? Does it already have a shell similar to bash?

[keskiverto]

So what do you mean by Linux programming? That could be Unix shell scripting with something like bash; or it could mean Programming in C with the built in system calls; or Linux kernel programming?

... or programming, compiling and linking C/C++ applications?

Yes, OS X has terminal, shell, plenty of GNU utilities, X11, etc. Linker in OS X behaves differently than in Linux, and OS X has "application bundles".

System management ... there are several families of Linux distros that each have slightly different management approaches.


There are no "good VM's". There are virtualization platforms that are applications on the baremetal host (OS X for you) and allow creation and execution of virtual machine instances (VM's). Your first question is, which platforms are available for Mac. Does Mac have something builtin or do you have to install third-party?