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.
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.