This does work great with only the slight issue of getting access to my networked drives.
Thinking I may be over complicating matters, I started to look at the native Windows versions of the programs that were most useful to me from Ubuntu. These were Gimp and Inkscape. The CAD package that is the base of most of my work does occasionally fall over. So to help reduce that, it is not ideal to load lots of applications.
Somewhere along the way I found a nice tidy solution with Portable Apps.
These are intended to be loaded onto a USB stick and run without doing a full install. Well there is no reason why they can't also be installed onto the hard drive.
This gives the following benefits:-
- I now have easy access to lots of native applications.
- They don't need to be 'installed'.
- All updates are from one place.
- The latest 2.8 version of Gimp.
The VirtualBox solution will remain, but day-to-day work will be with the Portable Apps.