Welp, it’s finally happened. Windows 10 has become so bloated, slow, and spooky that I finally have decided to bite the bullet and set up a VM on my linux Mint partition. Do you have any suggestions for a virtual machine? My PC is a relatively basic mid-range business laptop, 8gb of ram, no GPU, only a few years old. I’m a little concerned about performance impact, as I’ve heard that VMs take more system resources than the OS running natively. Any recommendations of software/configurations that would work best for me?
EDIT for clarity: The games i intend to run are, largely, older non-steam games. i obviously just use proton for all my steam games, but some weird older ones don’t have a steam release/i don’t have the steam version.
My suggestion: Don’t.
As far as I am aware a VM only makes sense for gaming if you have a second GPU. And even then it’s a pain in the arse.
Use Proton/Wine instead. Steam has that integrated so that most games just work out of the box.
Be aware, most modern games won’t run well or at all if you only have integrated graphics.
GPU passthrough is possible if you only have one, but it’s TWO pains in the arse to set up and operate
And you kinda lose most of the benefits apart from a little more sandboxing. If you have to log off your whole session to switch to the VM it’s just extra complicated dual booting.
deleted by creator
And most anti-cheates won’t play nice with VMs, unless you’re Nvidia.
VM detection that I’ve run into is not that hard to bypass, but it does subjectively seem to result in a less performant VM (haven’t ran any tests to verify).
I’ve been a Linux gamer for a few years now. I don’t have Windows at all. Between Steam’s “Steam Play” and Lutris, you can play most games without issue. To find out if the games you want to play will work on Linux, check https://www.protondb.com/ and https://aclist.github.io/. Good luck!
I think there a bit of an XY problem here - what software/game do you need to run in the VM?
Most games run fine in Proton (which comes bundled with Steam), and those that block Proton also tend to block VMs.
I wouldn’t virtualize windows with 8gb ram. Also, gaming on a VM normally is not possible, unless you want to pass a GPU to it, which isn’t possible on a laptop. I’d say dual boot. Have a your main linux system where you do your work stuff and a windows one for 2 games that don’t run on linux. Though, unless you play those few games, you’ll probably be fine even without windows, as most games tend to run fine on linux these days.
@bluestarshield Proton and Lutris will serve you just fine. VMs will have their own problems, especially if you are playing multiplayer games. Risk of ban is way higher. Even Geforce Now, a professional service, was having issues with Call of Duty players getting banned just for using the service. Linux with Proton is simply fine.
flatpak install bottles pupgui -yIn ProtonUp download the latest Proton-GE (the Steam Proton doesnt work reliably outside of steam, the Glorious eggroll version does) and install in Bottles.
In Bottles create a new Gaming Bottle, install your Games there and see what runs.
After that, for the not running games, I think using a second drive (avoid dualbooting like hell!) with a debloated windows 11 should be best. Using WinUtil from christitus, and BulkCrapUninstaller you can make windows tolerable.
Also using Rufus on Windows you can and should create a Win11 USB stick that has ms account, telemitry and (if you need it) hardware requirement checks disabled.
Someone can correct me if I’m mistaken, but as far as I can tell VM gaming has become pointless in recent years.
Proton/Wine will let you run almost everything on Linux with the exception of some games with rootkit anti cheats, and you’re likely to be banned if you run the latter in a VM anyway.
I game in a Linux VM on Linux
Ladles and jellyspoons of the fediverse, I have reason to suspect Linux may be afoot.
As someone who runs VMs, i suggest you dont. Ivd been doing it for about 2 years and i still have moments where lets say i want to expand my storage and a bork it, or accidently removed a virt selection on virt manager by mistake.
An easy solution. Run conty.
https://github.com/Kron4ek/Conty
It creates a virtualized arch linux with all the needs for gaming without having you worry about the heavy stuff. All the list of programs already on the list including other launchers for other games.
Here is a video explaining it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=yugKXXzAdqY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Don’t bother, VM or wine/proton is not good in term of performance if you don’t have a good hardware (expect 50-80% fps loss), your best option is to dualboot and use Linux for everything except gaming that should free up resources for games on windows (de-bloat is recommended)
The problem with “de-bloat” (the one I am familiar with, the one Mental Outlaw spotlighted a few years ago) is that it’s deprecated and Microsoft actively works against debloating software. If you’re familiar with some script/software that works in 2024, I’d be glad to hear it.
