Best Dual Boot / Parallel OS?

Parallels or VMware Fusion are both excellent virtual machines if you need Windows running at the same time as OS X. Or, you could just use the built in Boot Camp and reboot when you need to switch between OS X and WIndows.

Parallels and VMware Fusion seem to be the most popular. Also, VirtualBox is free. But I prefer Parallels.

Both Parallels and Fusion allow you to use your current Boot Camp installation of Windows as the guest operating system. So you have the best of both using Windows through a VM and if necessary booting it with Boot Camp. No reinstall of Windows required. Just install Parallels or Fusion and when it comes time during configuration to identify the guest OS just point to your Boot Camp Windows.

VMFusion here running Win 7 64 bit and Linux Mint "themed" to look like OS X with Macbuntu script

there is a performance hit, I'd say a vm runs about 1/5th the full hardware peformance of direct bootcamp install, more RAM certainly is needed.

most programs don't need full hardware performance though, so even at 1/5 th they still work just as fast if on 5/5 ths

Since I grew up on Sun Solaris, I'm an Oracle Virtualbox fan all the way 😝

It has it's place, look carefully at my image. 😁

I've run into some quirky video behavior with VMWare and have been using Parallels more successfully but I think both offer trial periods so you could see what works best for you. And as reported no problem using the bootcamp partition, you can get going pretty easily.