In current versions of Firefox you hover your mouse over a non-active tab [...] to see (after a small delay) a tooltip containing the web page title.

Uh... what is the point of that? If I am looking for a specific tab then:

• I probably want to switch to the tab that I am looking for, so staying on the current one is not required
• if there are a few tabs from different pages from the same domain the difference might be hard to see on a thumbnail (similar page headings with logos)
• and most importantly: opening the tab is faster than waiting for the delay anyway

This sounds like a "cool" feature that's looking for an actual problem to solve.

A crash in the window manager takes down all running applications: Yes, because the compositor IS the server, window manager AND compositor at the same time.

Maybe not anymore in the future: https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/qt6_wayland_robustness/

Wayland is biased towards Linux and breaks BSD

FreeBSD already has working Wayland compositors by the way.

X11 and Wayland are just protocols. These protocols are used to abstract the window drawing from the actual hardware and runtime environment as much as reasonably possible - because nobody wants to maintain 3215 versions of their app for different runtime environments. So in order to be shown on the screen an app needs to implement either the X11 or the Wayland protocol (or both!).

The piece of software that is on the other side depends on whether the app is using X11 or Wayland. For the sake of simplicity let's assume that the app does only support one of those. If the app supports Wayland then it will try to connect to a Wayland compositor. The compositor implements every part of the protocol and makes sure that the window is rendered on the screen and that user input is forwarded to the app. If the app supports X11 then it will try to connect to a X server and take the role of an X client. This is (on Linux, essentially) always X.org*. X.org also implements every part of the protocol and makes sure that the window is rendered on the screen and that user input is forwarded to the app.

* Unless you're running a Wayland compositor, then it will connect to XWayland which passes through the window to your compositor.

Wayland compositors have full control over the apps while the abilities of apps are purposefully restricted.
A window manager is just another regular, boring, old X client connecting to the X server. It doesn't actually abstract anything. It can move windows because the X11 protocol allows it to, but any other X client could just as well move all other windows around, read all user input to all other windows and even move the mouse around as it pleases.

So, to be specific, there is no mouse pointer bug in Virtualbox while using Wayland. There is a mouse pointer bug affecting specific Wayland compositors, likely because they enforce GPU hardware acceleration that is lacking in either your VM or the Linux kernel because of missing drivers. Try using a different compositor, (re)installing Virtualbox Guest Additions with the correct version on the guest system and/or check whether hardware acceleration is enabled for the VM and has enough video memory.

I don't know about the creators of this project, but in general: So that they can use the stuff in their closed source applications while finding enough contributors to write software for them for free.

Sie sind vermutlich Siedler aus der Gegend und als eingezogene Reservisten sind sie Mitglieder der Armee.

So that people can't easily track how much time is spent on getting round window corners compared to how much time is spent not implementing thumbnails in a file chooser dialog?

18 years, by the way.

Ich hätte lieber, wenn in geschlossenen Ortschaften generell 30 gefahren werden müsste, aber die Argumentation von Anwalt Klinger ist ja absolut haarsträubend.

Falls seine Klienten die Schilder abmontieren müssten, "würde sich das bundesweit auswirken, beispielsweise auch auf freiwillige Geschwindigkeitsmesser mit einem Smiley, wie man sie in vielen Dörfern sieht".

Brudi, das Problem ist, dass das originale Schild farb- und designtechnisch aussieht wie ein reguläres Verkehrszeichen (Es ist verboten, Zeichen aufzustellen, die amtlichen Schildern gleichen, "mit ihnen verwechselt werden oder deren Wirkung beeinträchtigen können".). Ein Geschwindigkeitsmesser mit einem Smiley sieht nicht aus wie ein reguläres Verkehrszeichen.

Abgesehen davon:

Aber stehen nicht überall in der Republik Tafeln oder Pappschilder, auf denen Anwohner bitten, langsamer zu fahren? "Den Kindern zuliebe"?

Ja, die stehen an vielen Stellen, haben aber üblicherweise keine rot umrandete Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung aufgedruckt.

It's never going to happen on Wayland level. It's absolutely no problem to implement this on a compositor level.

Grüße gehen raus an meinen bevorzugten Kugelschreiberlieferanten: www.penisland.net (Sicher für die Arbeit - aßer dein Chef hat keinen Humor)

I'll answer what I can in good conscience.

Is that a good idea?

If you keep in mind that it won't 100 % behave like a "proper" installation when things go weird it's fine.

Do different distributions work better or worse on VMs?

VirtualBox comes with some pre-made profile for some distributions but I've never been able to tell what those actually do, other than by default selecting virtual hardware that is supported.

Are there any major differences when using linux in a VM compared to a bare metal installation?

VM "hardware" is well supported, but anything requiring proper hardware acceleration (of any kind) will either perform terribly or fall back to a software-based backend. I.e. desktop compositing or hardware video decoding may or may not work as well as a native installation. Video games likely won't work in a usable way at all, unless it's Solitaire. Also the hard disks are decoupled from the VM to the host system and you need to manually forward USB devices to the VM or the system might not be able to detect them.

Is there any [dis]advantage to “Linux VM on Windows” VS “Windows VM on Linux”?

That entirely depends on what you want to use both systems for. If you already have Windows installed then I'd like to suggest the following path:

• run some live USB to figure out whether your hardware is supported (graphics, sound, network, printers - especially the latter two)
• if so, install Linux in a VM first (install multiple desktops and try them out, because why not)
• figure out what programs are available that do the things that you usually do on Windows - keep in mind that just because $PROGRAM is written by GNOME/KDE/LXQT/... people that doesn't mean that it won't run perfectly fine on other desktops. Also: distributions may not ship all software, don't forget to check Flatpak/Flathub if your distribution is missing some software.
• try them out in the VM to see if they meet your basic requirements
• install the Windows version of those programs on Windows
• over time, replace the Windows programs that you used to use for the ones that are also available on Linux
• if after a few months there are no non-Linux programs left: Congrats, back up your data and just use Linux
• otherwise: figure out whether the programs that you need will run well enough with Wine or in a Windows-VM

If it turns out that there's just too much Windows-only software that you can't part with then you can just delete the VM and that's it. On the flip side you can find software that may just happen to be better than what you used previously. Also trying out various distributions is much, much easier this way - installing the tenth distribution on bare metal because you weren't happy with the previous nine isn't particularly fun.

That means every time a new Kernel version is installed, the Nvidia driver DKMS has to be installed too. And that is basically the slowest part.

ZFS users: "First time?"

You're supposed to use hplip for HP printers. There's a Debian package for it in the main repositories.
edit: You can look up the printers and supported features with hplip here. Looks like your printer is perfectly supported (as long as you let hplip's tray program install their proprietary driver plugin).