Or, hear me out, buy cheap SSD for each operating system. For as low as $200 you can have a solid operating system of any flavor. Not an option because you're running thing on laptop and is not good to tear the laptop apart to replace SSD? OK, then how about:
Run each operating system in it's own VM and you can encrypt its folder. Not an option because you want to use games on your Windows and those are notoriously difficult to run inside a VM? OK, then how about:
Run a hypervisor on bare metal, like VMWare ESXi. You get now each operating system to be running on bare metal just like if it's alone and on Windows you can definitely play those notorious difficult games.
> The lengths some people go to continue working with Windows and the hassle they are putting up with for that amazes me.
Agreed, even gaming on Linux has progressed to the point that unless you're a competitive gamer you can play nearly any Windows game on Linux thanks to Valve's Proton, as well as the advancements made by the Wine team and the growing Vulkan support by game developers.
I am a only Linux users and I want to challenge this myth of Proton just working. To be honest I am disappointed that people are misleading others, the Proton DB website will give Platinum badge to games that don't just work
See Fallout NW https://www.protondb.com/app/22380
it is Platinum but check the comments for the issues reported and workarounds that might work (I had to give up for now) , For the Gold badge see example https://www.protondb.com/app/719040 , you need custom proton versions and customization.
Can we please be honest and say that with some or a lot of work we can get many games running in Linux but is expected of you to know your way around Wine tech to configure and fix stuff.
Similar complaint about Arch/wayland/CoolShit2000 works great for me but the full truth is hidden that it kinda works if you use this DE, and this Video card, and not use that feature and you read the wiki before you do anything.
Any other Linux users that agrees with me and is tired of the misleading "it works perfect now"
> "Any other Linux users that agrees with me and is tired of the misleading 'it works perfect now'"
So, I never said Proton was perfect or that it works with every game. I also mentioned Proton as only one of several technologies for playing previously Windows-only titles on Linux.
I get where you're coming from, and I have had my own frustrations with Proton in the past. With that said, even some native Linux ports have been problematic (Rust, 7 Days to Die, etc.) so it's not just Proton itself with the issues. Overall though, my experience has been overwhelmingly positive lately, and certainly far better than it was ten years ago.
I agree that wine,DXVK did a lot of progress and I can say that is an impressive technology. The issue is that the number of games that just work is small not large as it was implied. Some popular games will have some patches you need to compile into wine or find a pre-build version with those and other less popular games don't work or worse stop working half way through(happened for me with Elex),
I would say if you want to play games on Linux that are not official you will need to be prepared for some reading and trial and error, do you disagree ?
I will agree Proton isn't perfect, but I will also agree that outside of pro-Gamer needs, it is a platforms in and of itself that has a very good selection that I certainly can live with, and certainly seems much more appealing than e.g. gaming on MacOS.
I didn't have to configure a single thing to get excellent and bug-free performance on games like Witcher III and GTA V, and a host of others too.
IT is true that we can enjoy mroe games on Linux then Mac users that upgraded to latest OSX.
It is also true that some games are supported by Valve and they should just work.
But there are more games that don't "just work" then games that do. I would prefer to the community would be more honest about it, like if you want to convince someone to try Linux and you show him that his preferred game is "Platinum" or "Gold" but the reality is different then the Linux community will become even more of a joke.
As a linux only gamer, I wouldn't say "nearly every game". Proton has normal wine issues. Check ProtonDB for a compatability rating before buying any windows game on steam.
Most all of the games worth playing (factorio, subnautica, KPS etc) either have native linux clients or work fine via proton/wine, but the latest and greatest non-indi titles generally don't. Anti-cheat/DRM/spyware is a linux killer because it wants to inspect the operating system during play. Whatever the latest batman game is called... it probably doesn't work.
In fact it disagrees twice: I used to run Windows in a VM with GPU passthrough, performance was excellent, but I still couldn't play Escape from Tarkov as its anti-cheat allegedly started kicking or even banning users running the game in a VM.
There are workarounds to hide the fact that you're running a VM from the guest, but it's not worth the effort and in fact the more workarounds you apply, the higher the chance of getting banned if you trip their detection code.
Other than dumb anticheat software, gaming on a Windows VM is feasible, if not expensive, when Proton doesn't work.
No kidding. I have a hacked-together solution including 2x GPUs, an HDMI 2.0 KVM, a "USB switch" which is flaky as hell (because the KVM emulates HID devices / doesn't support USB 3.0.), the guest (Windows) and host (Linux) share memory to avoid latency in the audio path, a second NVMe drive so the guest can have native access to storage, a second USB controller so I can pass USB 3.0 devices to the guest, and I bought an entire new motherboard and CPU (AMD TR 3960x + TRX40) because the Intel non-server silicon doesn't do PCIe ACS[1] and I got sick of building a custom kernel, etc.
All this so that I can essentially play two games on Windows that I can't/won't play on Linux. One is Stellaris: which runs on Linux but has massive issues w/ Wayland. The other is FFXIV (an MMO) which I'm sure you could coax into running w/ Wine, but I don't want to get banned from an online-only game because of some overzealous anti-cheat thinking Wine is a hack.
At this point I think I'm a slave to the sunk-cost fallacy. I've entertained buying a 300$ KVM[2] just to simplify this setup a tiny bit. I'm severely constrained in terms of case/motherboard/CPU options because of the insane amount (& spacing) of PCIe I/O required, before getting a proper system that supports ACS I would constantly run into weird QEMU/KVM/kernel bugs, etc.
If I have a win10 pc now, how do I install ubuntu onto a secondary drive? Just plug it in, boot to a flash drive with ubuntu, then install to the new drive? Is there some quirk about boot order or grub or something I need to be mindful of?
> Run a hypervisor on bare metal, like VMWare ESXi. You get now each operating system to be running on bare metal just like if it's alone and on Windows you can definitely play those notorious difficult games.
This is exactly how WSL2 works. Windows and Linux run as guests under Hyper-V.
This depends on which O/S one considers primary, and which are their requirements.
For example, this architecture prevents other hypervisors from running¹.
If one wants to run, say, a fancy filesystem that is native (to Linux) and/or stable, again, one can't.
If one considers Linux the primary O/S, they could give a shot at VGA passthrough - I assume that if the system supports ESXi, it should support VGA passthrough as well. I personally prefer it to a native Windows - besides not having to perform reboots (which is minor), I like to have a snapshottable system. The caveat is that if one wants a very stable guest, they should reserve the GPU for that purpose (I do).
Wat? I play games all the time on my Windows 10 + WSL2 setup.... which is exactly as I described: Windows running as a guest under Hyper-V alongside Linux.
And you have RDR2 running in that configuration? I mean to run RDR2 in your Windows guest OS that runs under Hyper-V? Because I tried that and it won't run. I could only run it under VMWare ESXi
I believe the point he is making is that the games can run in the native Windows above Hyper-V and then WSL2 / other Linux installs can be run under Hyper-V from the native Windows OS.
As far as I understood it, Hyper-V is a native hypervisor like Xen or ESXi. So if you're using Hyper-V even your Windows is running as Guest alongside any other Hyper-V VMs and WSL2.
One OS per SSD is what I do on my desktop. Though these days the only thing I have been using Windows for really is Matlab (anyone get matlab working in Wine or otherwise?), so I really probably could just run a VM now.
My progression has been:
-> 2000 dual-boot Gentoo/Windows (mostly because of gaming)
-> 2012 (? I think, maybe 2014) Gentoo host with Qemu guest Windows GPU Passthrough (which was still sort of a dual boot since I could actually boot into that Windows SSD normally)
-> whenever proton came out, Gentoo 99% of the time and rarely boot into Windows getting rid of GPU/SSD passthrough because it was cool but ultimately too much hassle
-> now almost never boot into Windows (once every few months) except when working with one specific researcher who only uses Matlab, because Win is where my working Matlab install is ...
Inertia has kept the dual boot around because I don't want to set it all up again in a VM really.
I guess it's been years since I tried. It seems that Matlab does work fine in Linux now? Based on a quick search, that seems to be the case. I'll give it a go. Thanks for your comment.
It’s an operating system itself but it’s only job is to allow you to run virtual machines.
It has a web gui allowing you to vnc* and interact with the virtual machines using only your browser, or you can install apps on your PC for a better experience.
You can limit the resources that each VM has, only a portion of the RAM, only some of the CPU threads etc.
It has a free version, but IIRC the free version limits you to 8 CPU threads per VM.
You can also pass through hardware to an individual VM, .e.g. a whole graphics card and a USB keyboard/mouse. This means that if you were looking at the monitor and using the keyboard/mouse then you wouldn’t be able to tell it’s a VM. If you had two of each peripheral, you could run two local machines from a single tower.
I think Linus did something similar with unraid (same idea) and ran 8 (?) gaming VMs from a single tower using 8 GPUs, 8 monitors etc.
Note that nvidia doesn’t like you using GPUs in VMs and actively fights against it in the drivers but there are workarounds.
> Or, hear me out, buy cheap SSD for each operating system.
Probably gonna need a tutorial for that, too. Was trying to set that up this weekend, but there didn’t seem to be an obvious option for dual booting with full disk encryption in the Ubuntu installer.
No special configuration is needed, as long as the EFI partition, the `/boot` partition, and the root filesystem (or LVM etc) are all on the same drive. Windows will overwrite the bootloader on its own disk but doesn't touch others.
Honestly, I don't really know anything about their reliability. I got the Kingston A400 because it was a name brand and it hasn't died yet. So that as a sample of 1 is fine.
Run each operating system in it's own VM and you can encrypt its folder. Not an option because you want to use games on your Windows and those are notoriously difficult to run inside a VM? OK, then how about:
Run a hypervisor on bare metal, like VMWare ESXi. You get now each operating system to be running on bare metal just like if it's alone and on Windows you can definitely play those notorious difficult games.