I’ve been dual booting Linux and windows for about two years now, but in those two years, I have never booted into windows, except by mistake.

This made me think about removing windows and just saving that wasted space for Linux. I only ever dual booted for the off chance the peer pressure to play anti cheat games was too great, but so far it hasn’t.

For the off chance where I want to play a game that doesn’t run well on Linux, is it a good idea to do that via VM instead of dual boot, or is it too much hassle? Will there be performance hit or any issues with those games?

  • Cyclohexane@lemmy.mlOPM
    8·
    2 years ago

    Thank you all for the helpful answers. I’ve deleted Windows and decided to not even try running it again.

    Hello Gentoo Linux full-time!

  • BOMBS@lemmy.world
    7·
    2 years ago

    The VM isnt going to have the specs of a true Win boot because some of the resources will be used to run Linux. The Win VM will still take up some storage space even if dynamic. If youre really set on playing Win-only games that are resouce intensive, I dont recommend getting rid of a a true Win boot.

    Or, you can be like me and just stick to games you can play on Linux only. As far as Im concerned, if my Linux Mint can’t play them, they don’t exist.

  • DigDoug@lemmy.world
    4·
    2 years ago

    I wanted to go the VM route about a year ago, but I ended up deciding that it was just too much hassle and have kept my Windows dual boot for the extremely rare occasions that I need to use it.

    I started out using the GTX 770 from my previous PC as the secondary graphics card to pass through to the VM - which is a lot easier than doing it with a single graphics card - but given how often I actually need to use Windows, I didn’t feel particularly comfortable with the extra power use.

    So I decided I’d have a go at single GPU passthrough - which took me probably about six months of on/off (mostly off, admittedly) tweaking to get to a usable state. The first time I managed to boot Windows from my Linux install, I nearly cried. After a while fiddling with it, I decided that, as technologically awesome as it is, it really wasn’t that much different than running it on bare metal. The straw that broke the camel’s back was my inability to get Windows to gracefully hand the GPU back to Linux, despite the fact that it should have been as simple as reversing the steps to give Windows the GPU in the first place.

  • mikehunt@lemmy.world
    3·
    2 years ago

    I’ve been running a setup like this for years without issues. Only the initial setup was a bit cumbersome, specifically getting it to work with just one GPU. Ran two for sometime before I got it working without issues though

    • PriorProject@lemmy.world
      2·
      2 years ago

      It’s possible to do passthrough with a single GPU? I thought the whole point of passthrough was that the guest operating system took control of the hardware directly and that precluded sharing it with the host. Is single-GPU passthrough with an accelerated desktop on the host viable?

      • mikehunt@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 years ago

        Yes it is, but ofc. the host screen goes blank when you start the VM. I run enerything on one virtualization host as VMs so this is not an issue. Basically I can run one machine that requires the gpu at a time, and of course all the headless ones like servers and the firewall keep running normally in the background.

        • PriorProject@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 years ago

          I see, that makes sense. So basically serially passing the device around from one system to the next. Thanks for the response, it’s been a long time since I looked at passthrough and this is news to me.

  • Satouru@beehaw.org
    2·
    2 years ago

    GPU passthrough works amazingly well… when you have the required hardware and spend a lot of time to make it work.

    It’s an elegant solution but it’s also difficult to setup and maintain. To be fair, I don’t think it’s worth it when you can just have a dual boot going. And you’re going to be running Microsoft’s software either way, soooo…

    If you have a very particular workflow that makes it very painful to reboot, then yeah it’s worth it, and yeah it works perfectly well. Otherwise, dual booting when you need to is more efficient and less time consuming, I think.

  • i_herd_servers@lemmy.ml
    2·
    2 years ago

    I’ve got it working in the end, but it was a lot of fiddling, googling,reading and stealing tidbits from different guides and a lot of trial and error, so unless you have a specific usecase (in my case it being a VM on my living room media server & getting VR working) i would go with Proton first, dual boot second.

  • turdas@suppo.fi
    1·
    1 year ago

    These days this is rarely that useful. The most common reason games don’t work on Linux is anticheat, and games with that kind of anticheat tend to try to stop you from running them in a VM too. There are ways around that, but it’s an annoying cat-and-mouse game.