This is the way!,

Tough I personally stopped dual booting with Windows due to their updates policy.

Sometimes I would not boot into it for months and then unskippable (or I forgot to skips them) updates would ruin that one hour of gaming I might have available...

atlas-os or hellzerg/optimizer can make windows semi-usable for gaming. they never update again.

I have a Windows VM on my main machine that I pass a GPU to for playing games. The idea was I'd just snapshot the disk so if windows hosed me I could roll back. In practice I just play games in linux through proton or native though. The Windows install always needs updates so it is a chore when I actually want to use it.

As an aside, I cannot believe how it is impossible to script the base windows install to do updates through the command line on a strict schedule! I ended up having to install some 3rd party powershell package and I still have some annoying limitations around feature updates with it. This should be built in!

Do you just use virtual box for something like this?

I split my time between two places, and game infrequently which means my SFF gaming PC is often still in the box until I need it, at which point Windows updates can waste the time I had for gaming.

Would love a way to use my laptop to keep some Windows VM snapshot up to date. Windows has ruined more gaming sessions than it’s provided for me lately.

I use QEMU/KVM/Libvirt. Virtualbox had experimental passthrough support for awhile but I believe they removed it.

Alternatively, you could use Qubes OS for that: https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/windows, https://www.qubes-os.org/faq/#can-i-run-applications-like-ga...