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.
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 most anti-cheates won’t play nice with VMs, unless you’re Nvidia.
I’ve been a Linux gamer for a few years now. I don’t have Windows at all. Between Steam’s “Steam Play” and Lutris, you can play most games without issue. To find out if the games you want to play will work on Linux, check https://www.protondb.com/ and https://aclist.github.io/. Good luck!
With that kind of hardware, you’re not looking at any gaming in a vm, practically. Since you already have a Mint partition, just use that. Modern Wine will run practically anything that doesn’t have an invasive unsupported anticheat
I think there a bit of an XY problem here - what software/game do you need to run in the VM?
Most games run fine in Proton (which comes bundled with Steam), and those that block Proton also tend to block VMs.
I wouldn’t virtualize windows with 8gb ram. Also, gaming on a VM normally is not possible, unless you want to pass a GPU to it, which isn’t possible on a laptop. I’d say dual boot. Have a your main linux system where you do your work stuff and a windows one for 2 games that don’t run on linux. Though, unless you play those few games, you’ll probably be fine even without windows, as most games tend to run fine on linux these days.
@bluestarshield Proton and Lutris will serve you just fine. VMs will have their own problems, especially if you are playing multiplayer games. Risk of ban is way higher. Even Geforce Now, a professional service, was having issues with Call of Duty players getting banned just for using the service. Linux with Proton is simply fine.
If you use steam I’d suggest you think about switching to bazzite. It’s made for gaming, and every steam game I’ve tried so far has worked flawlessly. I used to fiddle around with stuff to get some games working on arch, but after switching I was blown away with how easy gaming is on this distro.
I’ve found that, for about the last five years, if Steam and Proton won’t run it just fine, Lutris will. Heck, I fiddled around and got a copy of MS Office to run in Lutris!
Don’t and download https://www.bcuninstaller.com/
