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 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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And most anti-cheates won’t play nice with VMs, unless you’re Nvidia.
VM detection that I’ve run into is not that hard to bypass, but it does subjectively seem to result in a less performant VM (haven’t ran any tests to verify).