All in favour of me using funds to get a used laptop to install Linux on so I can do testing on. Might be close to 200 CAD so let me know if this is a worthwhile purchase or not.
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Someone donated some money towards this purchase, so I guess we’ll go ahead with it 
You can install Linux on almost any bit of second-hand ‘crap’, so that should not really be your worry.
What, perhaps should be your worry is WHICH Linux distro to install, and that, for testing an xTalk IDE is not an easy question.
I deploy Xubuntu in my EFL school for the simple reason that:
- It is dead easy to install.
- It looks a bit like Windows XP, so no-one has an obvous problem getting around.
- It has fairly low RAM overheads.
I was going to go with Ubuntu.
I verfy the builds on the latest 64-bit linux Mint (22.3 cinnamon 6.6.7), which has an ubuntu base. Linux Kernel 6.17.0.23-generic
Tom with OXT Lite had some problems with XFCE, so, if you release a ‘Linux’ version, you really want to consider if you are going to release a Linux version, or a version for a small subset of Linux distros: and, if you decide on the latter it might behoove you to supply a list of distros on which it should work.
We’re at least going to support Ubuntu.
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Ubuntu is but a small part of the Linux-verse.
We need to start somewhere though. You can see what Mark is using, so that’s a different distro too.
I will offer that many years ago I was doing the full build using VirtualBox on an i9 iMac without any problems. Later was also able to do so on a MBP, so a hardware machine for intel Linux shouldn’t be strictly required. I’ve not done any full builds in years though (since the open source version retired).
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Hi Brian. I have UTM installed on my MacBook Pro (M1), but the only builds of Linux I have for it are ARM-based (which will be good when we do ARM builds) but right now I just have the Windows 11 laptop and this MacBook Pro (M1). I know I can dual-boot the Windows laptop, but I prefer to be able to work on all three platforms at the same time and stop driving Mark crazy with me breaking the Linux build all the time.
Can’t resist… ubuntu actually has a 34% market share among linux distros. That’s far from a ‘small part’. And add to that 45% of enterprise linux servers are running ubuntu. Red Hat has a slight edge in ‘managed enterprise environments’ but now that they’re owned by IBM I wouldn’t bet on their future. Plus the distros that have a different display manager on a ubuntu base.
Sounds like we picked the right horse to hitch up to.
Linux has a long tail, but the head is Ubuntu.
“Ubuntu holds the largest market share among Linux distributions, accounting for 13.7% of Linux-based web servers and 27.8% of developer adoption for personal use according to 2025 data from W3Techs and Stack Overflow.”
UTM is just a UI for QEMU, which can emulate an Intel CPU (it can even emulate PowerPC 
and run macOS 9 to 10.5 Leopard ). It works fairly well on my m4 MBP.
I think I had installed an Intel version of Ubuntu a long time ago but it was really slow (I passed out during the install). I just have a little MacBook Pro M1 at my disposal.
Alrighty, Linux laptop has been shipped out (nothing will move until Monday though) so hopefully have it by the end of the week.
Apparently it’s getting delivered today!!
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Nope, it didn’t get delivered today but tomorrow (Tuesday) I’ll take pictures when it gets here
So apparently they couldn’t find the place yesterday (even though they’ve delivered here before) Now they have it scheduled for Friday delivery.