this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I've gone that road and I'll tell you that making a windows virtual machine is much less of a headache. I'd recommend using qemu/kvm over something like virtualbox because otherwise it won't be very usable
Yeah thats an entirely different thing. My GPU is weird and virt-manager doesnt work, while OpenGL enabled VMs are nice and smooth but had other problems with the correct viewer and all...
Asked ChatGPT for every damn parameter or viewer, user virt-viewer, remote-viewer, VNC, some GTK viewer.
I don't do passthrough on my windows VM, since I'm not doing 3D work it still works with qxl
What's your GPU and distro?
Without knowing those, start here
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF
I have an AMD Ryzen 5 Pro 3500U, Radeon Vega Mobile Graphics.
No passthrough here I guess.
Distro is Fedora Kinoite, with virgl and all that layered
Why is qemu more usable?
Because of GPU passthrough
Unless things have changed, graphics card passthrough is tough to use because you need two graphics cards. The one sent to the VM can't be used on the host if you plan on using the guest. For laptops this can be impossible to reconcile, and even for desktops this can be... weird.
Actually, things have changed - you can passthru with just a single GPU now, and for many users, it's actually more stable/reliable than a dual-GPU setup (as you do mention, it can be "weird"). There is a catch however, and that is of course you can't use/switch to your host OS while the guest is running, but that shouldn't be an issue anyways if you're going to be working out of the guest OS. There are scripts available that make this switchover automatic and seamless.
https://github.com/QaidVoid/Complete-Single-GPU-Passthrough
Here's a handy video that illustrated what this looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTWf5D092VY
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=eTWf5D092VY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It all comes down to a question of how much time (days? months?) you want spend fixing things on Linux that simply work out of the box under Windows for a minimal fee. Buy a Windows license and spend the time you would’ve spent dealing with Linux issues doing your actual job and you’ll, most likely, get a better ROI. Windows licenses are cheap and you get things working out of the box. Software runs fine, all vendors support whatever you’re trying to do and you’ll be productive from day zero. There are annoyances from time to time, sure, but they’re way fewer and simpler to deal with than the hoops you’ve to go through to get a minimal and viable/productive Linux desktop experience.
It takes 15 mins to make a stable and usable windows VM, also who buys windows licenses in a Linux community
15 minutes and 2 months fixing Wine and countless hours dealing with compatibility issues when someone sends you a doc.
they're talking about a VM, not wine. if you have a powerful enough computer to spare some resources, and don't have a graphically-intensive application, a VM is probably a good choice if you like/need linux for most of your workflow!
What's the point in running all your major apps in a VM? You'll still have all the "problems" of Windows with the additional overhead of having two operating systems running...
Also virtualization is a pain not only for "graphically-intensive applications", anything that uses GPU acceleration won't perform that well, even the Windows UI itself. GPU passthrough is also a pain because it requires another GPU and even then you'll have to get the image back to your system in some way which will have a performance impact on framerate.
i'm not saying that you should use a VM if everything on your PC requires windows... only if one specific app you sometimes need doesn't work on linux!
as someone studying foreign languages for example, i know that if i want to do translation, i'll have to use windows for some specific proprietary cat software. but i don't spend my whole time in a cat software! i would also need to work with email, and some projects would require me to use a browser-based tao software, and in those cases, i'd much prefer being on linux to use things like a better japanese input, tiling window management if on a laptop, and generally, not having to deal with advertisments!
Okay that's fair.
Thank you