This article on Ars Technica reports on problems encountered by some Linux users, caused by a recent update issued by Microsoft.

Typically for Microsoft, the problematic patch is meant to fix a high severity vulnerability that has been known about for 2 years, which MS has only just now addressed.

The update makes changes to GRUB, which is the boot loader used by Linux, and by dual-boot (Linux and Windows) systems, so the problems are only being experienced by users with a dual-boot set-up on their PCs. Such problems are one of the reasons why I don't use dual-boot.

I am not saying that the GRUB vulnerability didn't need fixing; it did, two years ago (by someone on the Linux side - I am not sure why this didn't happen)! Also, GRUB is not a piece of MS software, so it is rather cheeky of MS to patch it, and outrageous for them to break it with their patch.

I experimented with dual-boot when I first started using Linux, but quickly changed to using virtual machines (VMs).

Most power users of computers have good reasons to want to use both Windows and Linux. In my case these reasons include:

1. Outlook is my favourite email and calendar tool, and MS-Office my favourite document editing suite, and a VM lets me use them whilst also using Linux tools.
2. Linux includes a huge array of free development tools (editors, compilers, linkers, debuggers etc.), whereas Windows users normally have to pay for such tools. Once you have used the Bluefish code editor you will never want to go back to Notepad++.
3. Linux has far better virtual memory management than Windows (if you configure your machine with a dedicated swap partition), and so handles large workloads and large documents far better.
4. Linux has better (faster and more efficient) multitasking than Windows, so it better supports users who use many applications at once.
5. It is common nowadays that employers only provide access to their corporate tools and files via a VPN. If you connect to a corporate VPN while working remotely, all Internet access then goes through the company's network, which typically means slower web-browsing and restrictions on the sites you can visit, and the application you use for your private email is unable to access your private inbox and send mails until you disconnect from the VPN. I can connect my Windows VM to a VPN, and still have unrestricted access to the Internet from Linux; I have found this very useful.

There are several tools for running VMs:

• KVM/QEMU. The best performance of any VM system. Free for Linux, Windows, MAC and many other operating systems. There is also virt-manager, which is a GUI for managing your KVM/QEMU VMs.
• Virtualbox, from Oracle. Free for Linux, Windows and MAC. Provides an excellent user experience, although updates can be a pain.
• VMware. The VM system of choice for professionals and corporations. Not free. Available for Linux, Unix and Windows. There is also VMware Fusion for Mac computers.

Here are some of my pages about virtualisation:

• What is virtualisation
• How To Virtualise.
• Which is Better – Windows or Linux?

If you want to try out virtual machines, I would very strongly recommend running them on a Linux host (Ubuntu is probably the safest and easiest; when installing Linux remember to create a swap partition), not on a Windows host. Technically, it is possible to turn an existing Windows installation into a virtual machine disc image, but I have never managed to make this work, so you will probably want a Windows installation disc. Check out the "How To Virtualise" guide above, plus there is lots of help available online.