One still can put the less used system into an external SSD and boot from that. Much simpler.
The lengths some people go to continue working with Windows and the hassle they are putting up with for that amazes me.
Agreed, even gaming on Linux has progressed to the point that unless you're a competitive gamer you can play nearly any Windows game on Linux thanks to Valve's Proton, as well as the advancements made by the Wine team and the growing Vulkan support by game developers.
Can we please be honest and say that with some or a lot of work we can get many games running in Linux but is expected of you to know your way around Wine tech to configure and fix stuff.
Similar complaint about Arch/wayland/CoolShit2000 works great for me but the full truth is hidden that it kinda works if you use this DE, and this Video card, and not use that feature and you read the wiki before you do anything.
Any other Linux users that agrees with me and is tired of the misleading "it works perfect now"
So, I never said Proton was perfect or that it works with every game. I also mentioned Proton as only one of several technologies for playing previously Windows-only titles on Linux.
I get where you're coming from, and I have had my own frustrations with Proton in the past. With that said, even some native Linux ports have been problematic (Rust, 7 Days to Die, etc.) so it's not just Proton itself with the issues. Overall though, my experience has been overwhelmingly positive lately, and certainly far better than it was ten years ago.
I would say if you want to play games on Linux that are not official you will need to be prepared for some reading and trial and error, do you disagree ?
I didn't have to configure a single thing to get excellent and bug-free performance on games like Witcher III and GTA V, and a host of others too.
It is also true that some games are supported by Valve and they should just work.
But there are more games that don't "just work" then games that do. I would prefer to the community would be more honest about it, like if you want to convince someone to try Linux and you show him that his preferred game is "Platinum" or "Gold" but the reality is different then the Linux community will become even more of a joke.
Most all of the games worth playing (factorio, subnautica, KPS etc) either have native linux clients or work fine via proton/wine, but the latest and greatest non-indi titles generally don't. Anti-cheat/DRM/spyware is a linux killer because it wants to inspect the operating system during play. Whatever the latest batman game is called... it probably doesn't work.
This is my conclusion as well. Almost everything I want to play runs on Linux one way or the other, so this has become a non-issue for me.
I agree the latest DRM'ed AAA game probably doesn't work (yet), but I wouldn't want to play it anyway.
There are workarounds to hide the fact that you're running a VM from the guest, but it's not worth the effort and in fact the more workarounds you apply, the higher the chance of getting banned if you trip their detection code.
Other than dumb anticheat software, gaming on a Windows VM is feasible, if not expensive, when Proton doesn't work.
No kidding. I have a hacked-together solution including 2x GPUs, an HDMI 2.0 KVM, a "USB switch" which is flaky as hell (because the KVM emulates HID devices / doesn't support USB 3.0.), the guest (Windows) and host (Linux) share memory to avoid latency in the audio path, a second NVMe drive so the guest can have native access to storage, a second USB controller so I can pass USB 3.0 devices to the guest, and I bought an entire new motherboard and CPU (AMD TR 3960x + TRX40) because the Intel non-server silicon doesn't do PCIe ACS[1] and I got sick of building a custom kernel, etc.
All this so that I can essentially play two games on Windows that I can't/won't play on Linux. One is Stellaris: which runs on Linux but has massive issues w/ Wayland. The other is FFXIV (an MMO) which I'm sure you could coax into running w/ Wine, but I don't want to get banned from an online-only game because of some overzealous anti-cheat thinking Wine is a hack.
At this point I think I'm a slave to the sunk-cost fallacy. I've entertained buying a 300$ KVM[2] just to simplify this setup a tiny bit. I'm severely constrained in terms of case/motherboard/CPU options because of the insane amount (& spacing) of PCIe I/O required, before getting a proper system that supports ACS I would constantly run into weird QEMU/KVM/kernel bugs, etc.
I want off Mr. Bone's Wild Ride.
[1]: http://vfio.blogspot.com/2014/08/vfiovga-faq.html [2]: https://store.level1techs.com/products/kvm-switch-single-mon...
This is exactly how WSL2 works. Windows and Linux run as guests under Hyper-V.
For example, this architecture prevents other hypervisors from running¹.
If one wants to run, say, a fancy filesystem that is native (to Linux) and/or stable, again, one can't.
If one considers Linux the primary O/S, they could give a shot at VGA passthrough - I assume that if the system supports ESXi, it should support VGA passthrough as well. I personally prefer it to a native Windows - besides not having to perform reboots (which is minor), I like to have a snapshottable system. The caveat is that if one wants a very stable guest, they should reserve the GPU for that purpose (I do).
[0]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200914112802.80611-1-wei.liu@...
And I can have running wsl2 session with RDR2 running.
as far as I can tell, enabling wsl2 (thus hyperV) did not slow down windows in any meaningful way I could find.
Enabling wsl2 enables Windows' "virtual machine platform", which Windows itself will then run on top of as a guest.
And yes RDR2 is running stable 100fps uwqhd at max settings on my machine under these conditions.
My progression has been:
-> 2000 dual-boot Gentoo/Windows (mostly because of gaming) -> 2012 (? I think, maybe 2014) Gentoo host with Qemu guest Windows GPU Passthrough (which was still sort of a dual boot since I could actually boot into that Windows SSD normally) -> whenever proton came out, Gentoo 99% of the time and rarely boot into Windows getting rid of GPU/SSD passthrough because it was cool but ultimately too much hassle -> now almost never boot into Windows (once every few months) except when working with one specific researcher who only uses Matlab, because Win is where my working Matlab install is ...
Inertia has kept the dual boot around because I don't want to set it all up again in a VM really.
Perhaps you could try GNU Octave.
This is how Qubes OS works: https://qubes-os.org. Yes, video passthrough should be possible: https://qubes-os.discourse.group/t/list-of-programs-that-wor....
It has a web gui allowing you to vnc* and interact with the virtual machines using only your browser, or you can install apps on your PC for a better experience.
You can limit the resources that each VM has, only a portion of the RAM, only some of the CPU threads etc.
It has a free version, but IIRC the free version limits you to 8 CPU threads per VM.
You can also pass through hardware to an individual VM, .e.g. a whole graphics card and a USB keyboard/mouse. This means that if you were looking at the monitor and using the keyboard/mouse then you wouldn’t be able to tell it’s a VM. If you had two of each peripheral, you could run two local machines from a single tower.
I think Linus did something similar with unraid (same idea) and ran 8 (?) gaming VMs from a single tower using 8 GPUs, 8 monitors etc.
Note that nvidia doesn’t like you using GPUs in VMs and actively fights against it in the drivers but there are workarounds.
*not actually vnc, something propriety.
Probably gonna need a tutorial for that, too. Was trying to set that up this weekend, but there didn’t seem to be an obvious option for dual booting with full disk encryption in the Ubuntu installer.
You can get a 240gb SSD for less than $30 these days.
Run each operating system in it's own VM and you can encrypt its folder. Not an option because you want to use games on your Windows and those are notoriously difficult to run inside a VM? OK, then how about:
Run a hypervisor on bare metal, like VMWare ESXi. You get now each operating system to be running on bare metal just like if it's alone and on Windows you can definitely play those notorious difficult games.