GPU passthrough has been a game changer for me. I stream all my games from a computer in a closet running Proxmox. Windows is still there in the background, but I almost never have to interact with it
GPU passthrough is not streaming a game.
The game output is pushed out of the GPU exactly as if you were playing on bare metal. Streaming assumes some form of processing and pushing bits down a pipe.
The GPU passthrough is relevant because it means that you don't need to build out a whole machine for just windows to isolate it. Instead you put a GPU in either your server (or your main machine) pass it through to a windows VM and then stream from it (through something like steam big picture, nvdia streaming, sunlight/moonlight, etc) knowing that the only info Microsoft slurps up is gaming related. You can even isolate windows from the internet if your gaming habits don't require it.
Re:The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge
by Fire-Dragon-DoL on Sunday March 19, 2023 @09:25AM
(#35218688)
What kind of penalties you face with this setup? I suspect performance and maybe issues with peripherals?
I still use Windows on my personal machine due to gaming still not being comparably good on Linux across all of the titles I want to play - sometimes native releases aren't available, other times even Proton has issues running stuff on Steam. Apart from that, there is actually very little holding me back, since a lot of things on Linux are just better (mostly development related) and in general most of the popular distros feel good enough as a daily driver.
I wrote about my experiences before: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/a-week-of-linux-instead-of-... but I don't think that in regards to gaming (or other software) all of the titles will ever be supported, so a Windows VM with GPU passthrough might be an okay choice in the future for entertainment, with some Linux distro on the host for the rest of my computing needs.
Which is a shame, because on a technical level Windows is okay and has lots of good software built for it in the past. It's just the project management aspect of it that's annoying - the OS being taken in a direction with mainstream appeal, but without ways to always turn those customizations off and do it easily.