My Windows PC doesn’t even get turned on that much now. It is only for a few holdout applications like the cameras and IrfanView that I really need it for. At the moment I am using it to author some of the maps, but that isn’t happening all of the time. It can cope with aerial images coming over the network and is quite quick compared to the virtual machine I was using, but Linux can process them a lot faster in a VM, so probably better still in a real PC.
Now that I have been reassured that the Qgis issue with a lot of files open isn’t a bad design decision of the Linux platform then I can go back to a Linux VM to do the map design and it is faster than the Windows VM I have used up until now. The main problem is that for Linux we don’t get to choose which edition of the master can be installed. Hence a need for an older master can be a problem, and explains why I use a VM running Xubuntu 16.04 as it will always pull the 313ec55 build if you choose not to use the ubuntugis repository. There is an option that I could pull 313ec55 from the repository and build it from source on 17.04 or even mainpc and therefore have it running reliably and doing all the things I need to.
Now here is a great piece of software to analyse free disk space: Baobab
This does a great job of analysing disk space usage graphically on a PC. As you can see I have an issue that my home folder is using 1.5 TB on a system with at most 2 TB of disk. Sooner or later I will have to clean out some stuff like all those aerial photos I have downloaded to draw maps, and some of the virtual machines I have installed under Vbox.