Yeah, it doesn't have to be so hacky though. I really don't understand the architectural choices Microsoft made to make it so kludgy to work with, and half the problem is just that Hyper-V is slow and buggy compared to VMware's hypervisor. VMware Workstation just works, quite well, when it gets to use the proper VMware hypervisor.

Given the friction and cost involved in getting that working, it's probably smart to just run Linux bare metal unless you're doing work akin to what led me to that (e.g. needing to work with a Windows corporate environment while configuring Linux test clusters).