The amount of bullshit there is to make things work is… not that bad. When it comes to games, I just can’t. Having to reboot just to fix common FPS issues is too much. I’ve had a bunch of things that require a config change, which then has caused other issues.
The state of Linux Desktop is the best it has ever been and I’ll be back the moment Wayland works better. I love Linux, but for now, it’s not working out for me… Just needed to vent, thanks for reading.
I’ve been 100% linux for my daily home computing for over a year now… With one exception… To be honest I didn’t even try particularly hard to make gaming work under Linux.
Instead I have a Windows VM - setup with full passthrough access to my GPU and it’s own NVME - just for Windows gaming. To my mind now it’s in the same category as running console emulation.
As soon as I click shutdown in windows, it pops me straight back into my Linux desktop.
I do something similar but instead of a VM I just have windows installed on a separate hard drive and just boot up from there when I need it (I don’t play games though)
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Do you have a dual gpu setup for this or is there a virtualization feature I don’t know about yet
Single GPU with scripts that run before and after the VM is active to unload the GPU driver modules from the kernel.
I think this was my starting point and I had to do just a few small tweaks to get it right for my setup - i.e. unload and reload the precise set of kernel modules that block GPU passthrough on my machine.
https://gitlab.com/Karuri/vfio
At this point from a user experience p.o.v it’s not much different to dual booting, just with a different boot sequence. The main advantage though is that I can have the Windows OS on a small virtual harddrive for ease of backup/clone/restore and have game installs on a dedicated NVME that doesn’t need backing up
Search for “vfio single gpu”, It’s possible, but it has drawbacks. Iirc you have to run everything as root or something like that.
Another recommended way is to run a headless linux as host, and passthrough the gpu to a linux guest next to a windows guest, than you just switch between the guests
I meant to do this when I built my old system back in 2018, but I found the handful of games I regularly play worked okay on Linux so I never got around to it, and Linux game compatibility has improved leaps and bounds from there.
If it’s a Steam game, for most of them these days you only have to tick a box in Steam’s settings to tell it to use Proton for all games and the game will just work when you click play.
You might give it a try. Or don’t, I’m not your mother.
Fucking Hackerman. Is there a way to display the VM’s output in a window/fullscreen on Linux today? The last time I tried this, I had to have a separate cable from the passed-thru (secondary) GPU to another input in my monitor.
Looking-glass.io is what most use for that
Ooh, that project was not usable back when I tried VFIO. Nice.
What’re you using for visualisation? I didn’t realise you could get decent graphics performance with VirtualBox.
They didn’t say virtualbox, KVM is built into Linux.
Direct passthrough of the GPU means it is no longer available to the host OS but works as if directly connected to the VM.
Interesting. I had no idea such capabilities were available out of the box. Thanks!
People have been passing though GPUs to their windows vm for almost a decade.
Long past time for Linux to be set aside. Shit on windows too. We desperately need a return to early DOS and CP/M days. With the TRS-80 OS ecosystem, OSes were simple and command line, and any hacking was extremely easy and fast to detect. The power of the command line let you wipe out any hackers super super fast. Enough of this Windows GUI and hiding things from users shit. GUI is only for losers. Return the power to the devs.
Wow! Lol I hope this was satire because as satire it’s actually kinda funny. If serious… whoa! Check that foil hat.