I want to test run Arch Linux in a virtual machine, but don't know which hypervisor to choose. Is Virtual Box, or VMware the better Windows hypervisor for running Arch Linux?
EDIT: I decided to go with Virtual Box since Hyper-V just doesn't seem to work on my PC. Thank you everyone for the recommendations!
Virtualbox works fine for me. Just remember to note if you're setting up the VM with a modern EUFI, or an old fashioned BIOS, so you can install the right bootloader.
I've had no issues using VirtualBox, and never bothered with VMware because it is proprietary. I would only consider VMware if you were in a commercial environment where it's already in use.
You might be interested in these two wiki pages to compare how they work in practice:
I think both are usually fairly well supported, but VirtualBox being open-source it's probably got slightly better drivers for desktop use although I'm sure VMware has it pretty well covered as well.
Ultimately it's not going to affect the experience much. All Linux distros are going to perform comparably in a VM as long as the appropriate drivers are in use.
What you look for in a distro is more like the general experience of using it: does it have the packages you need, do you like the package manager and how the packages are structured, do you like how it sets up services. Especially for a more DIY distro like Arch, by the time you've set up your desktop environment and software you'll probably have a good feel of how the distro works already. With Arch in particular you won't be looking at any sort of out of the box experience (ie. does it install and support your hardware easily out of the box post-install) like you would if you were comparing Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Mint/SUSE/Manjaro.
They're very similar, though last time I used VMware, it had problems with the latest Linux kernels on Linux hosts, I don't know if it's the same on Linux guests if you have Windows on you PC, but you probably wouldn't want to reinstall everything if that's the case.
VirtualBox is fine with Linux in any case.
In case of Windows guests on Windows hosts, I find VMware has slightly better performance.
I don’t think it matters, both should work well. The only place you might see a difference is 3D graphics acceleration. Not sure what the situation there is these days.
VirtualBox will work just fine with the added benefit that you immediately have pretty seamless and working graphical environment. With vboxtools (or whatever that kit was called) you can even copy+paste between hypervisor and the virtual machine. Performance wise vmware might have a slight edge, but if you're running a homelab or just trying things around it's something not to worry about at all.
Windows 10 Home will run Hyper V guests but installation isn't obvious. Search engine of choice should show how. I think WSL 2 uses it as the default backend, so should be doable on 11 as well.
I'm not an expert, but I would say it doesn't matter that much. I'm using VirtualBox because it's easy to use, (partly) open source and it's multi platform.
Don't know about VMware, but VirtualBox does just fine - follow the 'guest additions' page, it runs Arch as well as any other Linux. Normal VB caveats apply - you dance with a great evil by inviting Oracle into your home; some things that you'd think would be routine, like compressing disk images again, require arcane CLI invocations; and so on.
If you're not familiar with it, windows now has native support to run Linux via the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2). It can integrate pretty well into your environment as well, like pushing vscode applications to run in the Subsystem. It apparently supports gui as well although I haven't tried setting that up myself.
If you can try andd use Hyper-V as it is windows native (if you have home edition then it's not something you can use because M$).
If you want a simple hypervisor VirtualBox will do just fine and I've had a generally better experience with that over VMWare (that said both will do the trick).
Lastly I should mention that you can use Qemu on windows; but I've never tried that myself and it might require some tinkering to get to work but it is the fastest virtualization framework I know of.
I can't say I'm an expert in this, but I would say use whichever you want. There won't be a big difference between then. If for some reason one doesn't work, try another one.