With the advances in gaming on Linux in recent years, it is so tempting to switch full time. I would absolutely love to, but I am a Game Pass Ultimate subscriber and it is where I play a lot of my games on PC. I know you can use the cloud version, but I cannot stomach streaming games in their current state, so it is a no go. A large portion of my Steam library is compatible, but anytime I have done an install I end up giving in and going back to Windows for games.
So one thing that might be worth looking into is virtual machines.
Currently on my desktop I run a variant of Arch (Endeavor I think) where I primarily do my gaming , but for any highly incompatible games, or Game Pass games, I have a virtual machine running Windows that uses pass-through to pass my graphics card through to the virtual machine for games I can’t play on Linux. I also use CPU pinning to ‘pin’ 10 of my 12 CPU cores to the virtual machine to reduce potential overhead.
Works really well, might be an option for you, although it’s not super easy to setup. I’ve tried passthrough on PopOS as well before, but it wasn’t as performant, and Arch Wiki provides a ridiculous amount of super useful guides for doing just about anything, including setting this up.
Edit: Otherwise in terms of daily driver, I love Fedora, and likely won’t move away anytime soon on my laptop.
This is way I do it. One thing to note is having a decently good motherboard with support for many IOMMU groups will make the proces of passing through the GPU and other devices much smoother. I lucked out and found out about this method while I was planning to upgrade my PC build.
Are you using single GPU passthrough? I run windows for games and linux for everything else with dedicated GPUs for each. Now I’d like to be able to do some gaming on linux as well because proton has come so far, but my linux GPU is definitely not up for the task. It barely handles hardware acceleration at 1080p without dropping frames on the nvidia proprietary driver and on nouvea it isn’t even worth it to try anything higher than 720p.
So yes. I had a similar setup to you, passed through my Nvidia card to Windows and kept my onboard Intel card for Linux, but much like you I wanted to game with both Linux and Windows, so now my onboard Intel card is disabled and instead I have some qemu scripts that detach the Nvidia card from Linux and to the VM, and vice versa once the VM is shut down. Was a pain to get setup, but actually works really well.
I’m glad to hear that. Last time I looked into it was when I was first building a PC specifically for KVM virtualization and it wasn’t working the greatest then (especially returning the card to host on VM shutdown). Now that it’s working better I may make a backup then try to see if I can get single GPU passthrough working. I’m excited by far linux gaming has come and wanna give it a try myself on better hardware.
I started down the road from Windows to Linux for my main rig a couple of months back after trying out a few distros on a new mini PC for HTPC/media server. Currently running KDE Neon on the TV, and I’d really like to get away from my Win11/Kubuntu dual-boot tower situation, since Proton is handling everything I throw at it short of Cities: Skylines.
The real sticking point is that I need to be able to use InDesign on rare occasions. I’ve used VirtualBox in the past for old DOS games and mused that a VM would be nice for the edge cases where I need Windows but haven’t gotten any further than that since it felt like the ROI wasn’t there.
What’s involved in setting that up in modern times? Obviously, I’m coming at this from Debian rather than Arch, but pointers on where to start looking would be appreciated.
Why though? DOSBox is a far superior experience if you wanted to play DOS games. Better performance, better compatibility, better config options (like being able to adjust the CPU speed on the fly), plus controller support and custom config and launcher support so you can just one-click launch your favorite DOS game.
Sorry I was unclear. That’s just the extent of my VM experience … it’s not relevant to my current needs, as I’ve not played DOS games since Win2K.
Ah, well you’re missing out. DOS games are still pretty fun and awesome. Having a blast paying Dangerous Dave right now, and will play Prince of Persia once I clock this.
I’ve still got quite the collection of classic DOS games that I may throw on the TV computer alongside classic console stuff … played a lot of A-Train back in the day. Getting the tower sorted is just a far higher priority.
Thank you. I have some experience with using virtual machines, but only for running old DOS/Windows 95-era software lol
Understandable, but virtual machines can be highly versatile! When I boot up my VM it’s as though I’m literally just running Windows as normal, and when I shut down the VM I’m back to Linux. I much prefer it to dual booting, though dual booting is 100% easier.
If you ever decide to look into it, here’s the Arch guide I was referencing: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF
Thank you! I will poke around and explore this.