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.
Someone can correct me if I’m mistaken, but as far as I can tell VM gaming has become pointless in recent years.
Proton/Wine will let you run almost everything on Linux with the exception of some games with rootkit anti cheats, and you’re likely to be banned if you run the latter in a VM anyway.
I game in a Linux VM on Linux
Ladles and jellyspoons of the fediverse, I have reason to suspect Linux may be afoot.
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.
GPU passthrough is possible if you only have one, but it’s TWO pains in the arse to set up and operate
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.
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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.
