I've been running 18.04 on a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon gen3 (i5, 4 cores, 8GB RAM, 250GB HD) for about a month. Good so far, in that I'm not yet contemplating running back to Windows like I did the first 4 times I tried this switch. If I can make this work on this laptop test, I'll install 18.04 on my workstation, which is a much beefier machine.
Like most potential switchers-to-linux, I have a few work-related apps that only run on Windows and are critical to what I do. I run them every day, all day. So I installed VMWare Player, and it installed and ran fine. These Windows apps are RAM intensive, so they ran slow, but they were stable.
After about a week of running VMWare, I found Gnome Boxes, and as various sources said it would run faster than VMWare, I installed it. That's when things got messy. It was a lot of work to install it (my better half just reminded me I called it a "hellish experience"), but after many hours it installed and I was able to install Win10. But it was not stable, it crashed constantly. I finally deleted it, thinking I would go back to VMWare.
Alas, this was not to be, as VMWare no longer worked. My previous VMs that I had set up would no longer launch. I created another Win10 VM, used it for a few minutes, shut it down, and could not restart it.
It seems the Gnome Boxes install may have somehow interfered with VMWare? Does anyone have any experience with having issues with multiple VM applications on the same PC? This entire experience is making me rethink the migration of my workstation from Windows to Linux.....but if I can get this fixed on my laptop (hopefully without a complete re-install of Ubuntu), it will give me confidence to move forward on the workstation.
