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.

  • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
    61·
    10 months ago

    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.

      • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
        5·
        10 months ago

        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.

        • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nlEnglish
          3·
          10 months ago

          You don’t necessarily have to. I know it’s possible to partially forward GPU hardware to a virtual machine for many Nvidia (vGPU) and Intel (GVT-g) GPUs. With Looking Glass you don’t even need to switch back and forth between VM and host.

          This method is finicky as hell and the Linux code that enables this is extremely unstable in my experience, but people have got it working. GPU forwarding with a single GPU is technically and practically possible assuming your hardware is supported by the drivers.

      • dragnet@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        1·
        10 months ago

        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).