Installing Windows after the fact

Yes, I did end up installing rEFInd. I hadn’t used it recently, but I did back when I was dual booting an old Macbook Pro

In a perfect world. I’ll be lucky to have any job at all, I don’t have my pick of ones to pay for upgrades to a computer that I probably shouldn’t have bought in the first place. lol

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That is quite interesting. My sister got a job in that field and they sent 2 monitors, a computer, a phone and a headset. You can always tell them you do not have a computer or say it is unusable. I don’t know your situation, but it might be worth trying. I prefer the idea of a system dedicated to work and one for personal use.

It was asked on the application if I had a computer with a minimum of Intel Core I5 processor, 16GB memory with a Windows Operating System that I was able to use for work, so if I didn’t have a computer, I wouldn’t even be considered for the job. It’s not ideal, but I’m trying not to have to settle for something like fast food just to have any job at all. (Although in truth, I had an interview at a coffee shop which didn’t lead anywhere either.)

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As @Kresimir said I would also recommend using a VM. That is what I used to do to work from home, it’s a nice way to keep it separate and they might have you connect through VPN or/and have some tracking software. A VM would be better in that sense as you could do other things on your break (never during work hours ofc :wink: ) without having their software interfere or know about it.

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The fact you are applying for the job tells me that you don’t know what the exact requirements are.
Most companies use a browser based intranet system and aren’t sure if Linux works on it.
I hope you will get the job and if you do, you just wait and see what the requirements are.

Browsers like Firefox can mask themselves as being a Windows system and most of the time that works also.

Everyone in the Linux community is B***ching about Microsoft being open towards Linux, but the upside is that most of their services are available for Linux as an online service (Teams, MS office, Edge, Outlook). In this case it is a blessing, most of the times it concerns those apps.

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My sister is struggling with her great kindergarten job (private kindergartens are struggling on the edge of going bankrupt because of the virus as wages need to be paid but parents keep their little treasures at home, out of harms way) and is looking to move to more secure areas like corporate customer support. It’s ugly and tough and I don’t envy her. But this is how it is. It’s hard to find any kind of job these days.
I wish you success in your new job.

Back to the point:
installing windows and linux on two separate drives, and booting off the linux drive which has refind allows you to choose the os at boot, without Linux ever affecting the boot partition of Windows. You can even boot that Windows install from a VM after the fact, if you passthrough the Windows drive as a whole to the VM. QEMU allows you to do that.
That way you can test the performance of your VM and go back to boot the normal way if you are not satisfied.
I’m using the same strategy and it works great.

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You’re right about my not knowing what exactly they need. The application specifically said Macs were not supported, but nothing about Linux. I did want to be prepared because there was mention of a web interview, but I wasn’t told how it would be conducted, and I didn’t want to have to scramble to install Windows if it was needed. I wasn’t sure how difficult it would be to put Windows on later, as I have always had Windows (or MacOS) first, and installed a Linux distro second. I have used Microsoft Office apps in my browser before, as you said, which is a good point.

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Remotely teaching English to Chinese kids, a job I had for 6 months.

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I’m sorry your sister is having a tough time. It’s a bit ironic how careers that seemed so certain a little while ago are now so unstable. (You would think that children are always going to need teachers.) Things are definitely rough all around, and I was unlucky enough to be making major life changes around the same time.

I’d never heard of passing the Windows partition to a VM before, that’s very interesting! Love learning new things, might be something to try out even just for my own interest.

That was exactly the reasoning behind the perceived security of her kindergarten job before the crisis hit.

While QEMU/KVM is not as straight forward to configure and get up and running as VirtualBox, it is way more powerful, as it allows exposure of a lot of devices directly to the guest OS (like graphic cards, network cards, drives, controllers, etc).

The advantage of running the partition raw from a VM vs booting directly to that partition is that you can communicate between Linux and Windows so you can share files. Also you can just fire up the VM do your 2 minutes stuff in it and go on working on your Linux OS, without needing to reboot and close everything. When you need all the bare metal resources, like when you want to game you can boot normally into Windows.

This is how you would expose the raw drive:

A very interesting fact is that Windows doesn’t mind (at least on my machine) booting from a virtual machine or bare metal. It doesn’t even blink. You would expect it to go bonkers finding that suddenly all components are not what it expects. But it deals with it gracefully.

I mean that the virtual machine typically emulates a generic motherboard, a generic CPU, GPU, USB bus, system devices and so on, while the bare metal devices are manufacturer specific and have their own drivers.

This is something that in previous Windows versions was inconceivable, something only Linux could do.

What is even more shocking is that it doesn’t trigger any activation problems, although license key is usually paired to the motherboard.

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