Go with parallels, without a doubt the best you can go with. Very fast and feels native.
The downside if you won't be able to use a windows manager like WMII. Because parallels provide bindings for unity that makes the whole experience smooth and they don't provide bindings for other windows managers
This is just an excellent visualization to explain a concept that is hard to imagine.
Lots of difficult concepts are actually very simple once you boil them down to the fundamentals and visualize them.
This has big implications for education. Many concepts like derivatives in finance, algorithmns in computer science are suprisingly simple.
I remember a visualization for Paxos (a distributed consensus algorithmn) which basically have an actor to represent each node in the network. That was the moment I finally "got it".
It is a shame that educators are still so backwards at how they communicate concepts to students. and how ineffective that is. I think it comes down to the fact that professors in universities have to play dual role of being a researcher + to teach. And since they are recognized for publishing papers and not so much for making helpful visualzations to explain concepts to first year students. Education part is neglected.
Stories like this sometimes just break my heart. When you are at a certain age, money just doesn't matter any longer.
Although the world can't just sit here and stop development and wait for people to move on. I am always so torn on how to feel about these types of situations.
I am not much of a cook but everytime I cook, recipes never work.
Sometimes, it seems like that if you follow the receipes measurements exactly, your food almost never tastes like what you expect. There always needs a bit of human discretion.
As such, I find video recipes to be far more effective. You can see them cook and get a feel of what "cook meat until brown" really means, or what is a "sprinkle of green onion"
I might be the odd one out. I have a macbook pro retina running ubuntu 14 using parallels. Could not happier.
Assuming budget isn't an issue, I find many linux laptops (including the 13inch Dell) to have bad UX. Relatively short battery life, low res screen, and may i say, terrible trackpad.
Apple trackpads are significantly better than all competitors.
On top of that, a lot of nice to have apps don't run on linux. Things like screenhero. And apps that do have a linux build often don't work as well. (Think skype, hipchat)
Running VM on macbooks is the best of both worlds, you get linux for development and OSX for everything else.
The downside if you won't be able to use a windows manager like WMII. Because parallels provide bindings for unity that makes the whole experience smooth and they don't provide bindings for other windows managers
https://www.parallels.com/