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?
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.
i’ve had good success with this but ofc ymmv. it can be hard to get your windows vm performance tweaking right and it can take a buttload of time. if you want best mitigation of anti-cheat risk and best performance then you should continue to dual boot imo.
Do you do this to play games with anti cheat? I read that some games detect that. Are there ways around it?
depending on how you virtualize your windows install, yes, there are ways to kind of “spoof” your machine details (like manufacturer, desktop instead of vm) but again, it won’t be fool-proof and it might take a lot of time to get working well. i definitely have not tested that many triple-a windows games with anti-cheat because that’s just not my gamer wheelhouse, but so far after spoofing some of my machine details (spoofed as a baremetal oem install) i haven’t had any issues.
What hypervisor are you using?
I use proxmox and run a couple windows VMs for Remote Desktop. I’ve passed through nvidia gpus and even at point had a nvidia grid setup running splitting up a P40 across multiple VMs.
The nvidia gpu’s require several config options to ‘spoof’ a real desktop and prevent the code 43 error but windows still identifies them as virtual machines. I’ve never found a way for trick windows itself into thinking it’s stand alone.
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Its been a while since I’ve had any gpu’s attached to a windows VM but I think my time pre dates the change. I realized they were not actually doing anything for my given workloads so I sold most of them. The P40 is setup in a VM for tensorflow now and one of these days Ill get the time to go back to that.
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I have recently been playing with VMs in Unraid and in the video tutorials I’ve seen they talk about about grouping together (by editing xml file[1]) the video with audio that comes the GPU to avoid that error. Also about passing a modified BIOS. Are those the workarounds been talked about here?
[1] multifunction=‘on’
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!
The good ending
I was in the same boat as you and deleted Windows two years ago. Never regretted it and I’m sure you won’t either 😃
I’ve read that the anti cheat engines will be triggered by a virtual machine. Not sure which games you play but you might have issues if they are online.
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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
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?
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.
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.
@cyclohexane Anti-cheat will often detect and prevent/ban it, so the use case it fills is that ever-shrinking group of games that run on Windows, can’t run under Wine/Proton, and don’t have anti-cheat.
Not sure it’s worth doing at all.
So it looks like either commit to dual booting, or commit to never playing those games…
Maybe I’ll just commit to never playing them. I’ve never used windows in 2 years, so it’s a waste keeping it…
Hey op if you do go with passing through your GPU check this out https://looking-glass.io/
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.
It used to be worth it, but Linux can run so many more games now thanks to Proton and other improvements. Most of the games that won’t run on Linux now don’t run due to anticheat, and many anticheat programs don’t like VM/GPU passthru.
So basically I don’t consider it worth it anymore.
Personally a game that doesn’t run on linux turn me down so much that i don’t want to play it at all. Check https://libregamewiki.org/Main_Page
Same here, dropped my dual boot since Jan 2020 and if I don’t see at least silver on www.protondb.com, I simply wait. Proton will get there eventually.
You might get Issues with some Anti Cheat Systems
The way I would handle things is first I would look for a native Linux version, and if that wasn’t available, then I’d try to use Wine / Proton, and if it didn’t work that way either, then I’d look at streaming it through a service like GeForce Now. It would be easiest to have a separate drive with Windows on it but now that Microsoft is turning Windows into ad-filled spyware more than ever before, especially with Windows 11, I’d rather use one of the above options instead.
I’d even be tempted to get a Mac Mini to handle the software that wouldn’t work with one of the above options rather than use Windows.
I did this for a while with single GPU passthrough, Although keeping it working didn’t seem to be worth it in the long run.
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.
