I have a spare laptop from the days when I was pursuing linux as my full time operating system. It’s a nice one—a daru2 from system76.
I’ve been using it at work so that I would have access to a linux machine while using the windows workstation that I had. Recently though the department has switched over to linux for everyone (aside from a few holdouts) so I don’t need a separate linux computer.
This leaves me with a computer to experiment with.
I was thinking I would set it up as a multi-os system using virtualization. I would set up something very lightweight to run guest OSes. I thought it would be really cool to use esxi. However, I have found that esxi is only really meant for use with servers. You can’t get a visual interface to your os on the computer running esxi—you can only dial in from another system.
So, I’m back to needing an actual OS to run a the guests. I want something ludicrously lightweight, so I guess I need a linux of some sort. And as long as I’m at it, I may as well have a GUI to manage the VMs with.
Right now, I’m thinking a stripped down version of Arch running wmii, but I’m not sold on any one thing yet.