A virtual machine can easily emulate a different operating system. You can try different operating systems without having to reboot a computer. You can run Windows, macOS, Linux, or other operating systems on your operating system. There are many benefits to using a virtual machine. You can test software, play old games, test suspicious mail attachments for malware. You can even use a virtual machine for additional security. For example, you can use admin tools inside the virtual machine for remote access and management of your IT infrastructure.
Usually, you install the required operating system in the virtual machine. That takes a lot of time. If you install it once, then fine, you can deal with 30 minutes for installation. But if you have to test several operating systems, you could spend time installing for other tasks.
To save some time, you can download pre-built virtual machine images. To download virtual disk images for VirtualBox, I will list a couple of resources to save you some time.
MS Windows 10
You can visit the Microsoft developer website. Here you can choose the virtual machine type, in our case, we will choose VirtualBox. Once the download is complete you can import VM to VirtualBox.
Linux
Linux has many different distributions so installing them all just to test the system, would require a lot of time. You can use websites that specialize in providing VirtualBox images.
OSBoxes
OSBoxes is one of the most popular websites where you can get most if not all distributions available as VirtualBox images.
Linuxvmimages
Linuxvmimages have a little bit fewer images compared to OSBoxes but the range is still quite extensive. You will find distributions like CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Linux Mint, MX Linux, Manjaro, Solus OS, Deepin, PoP!_OS, Kubuntu and Elementary OS. They have VirtualBox and VMware images available.
Conclusion
When you would like to test Linux distributions, either as your next potential operating system of choice or just to see how far Linux has come, you can save some time and download pre-installed images. That way, all you have to do is to import the image to the VirtualBox and you can start the system immediately.
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