I have been using Arch Linux with i3wm for around 5 years for work, on my ThinkPad. I am fairly comfortable with pacman and setting up a distro. I have previously tried Mint, Manjaro, KDE Neon, Elementary, and MX Linux, all for the same use case (Work: where I need a browser, Slack, and a MongoDB GUI).

However, I have been using Windows on my desktop that I use for gaming and the Adobe suite (photoshop and illustrator mainly). With the increasing enshittification of Win11, I want to migrate full time to a Linux system on desktop as well. I prefer a more stable experience on this machine so I chose Pop OS (other suggestions are welcome. I like Plasma). I need some help getting started (I did some preliminary trials on a VM where I was able to run a small game off GOG, but the part I need help with needs some trickery wrt different disks).

PC specs:

  • Ryzen 3 3300X
  • 16 GB DDR4
  • 1 NVMe boot drive, 1 SATA SSD for games, 1 HDD
  • RX 570 8 GB

My copies of Photoshop and some of my games are pirated. I’m planning to run a Tiny10 VM for the Adobe stuff but the games will need to run on bare metal linux, off the NTFS formatted game drive. Edit : Most importantly, Content Manager and mods for Assetto Corsa need to work (not pirated), with my Thrustmaster T128

I would be grateful for a guide for this.

  • @olympicyesEnglish
    2•6 months ago

    I use Ubuntu but the arch wiki is great for this. Research VFIO via QEMU/KVM. You can pass through your GPU. Check into either adding a second GPU (I use AMD for the host and Nvidia for the guest), or single gpu passthrough. Wendell from Level1Techs on YouTube is a great resource as well as the VFIO subreddit.

    I don’t think your hardware is probably good enough since your cpu is 4 core 8 thread which is cutting it tight. Some AMD cards gave a pci reset bug which means you can use it in a vm but the card won’t be released when the session is over. New AMD cards aren’t affected, but not sure on 570.

    Overall bare metal vm costs more to implement but makes it way easier to never dual boot.

    My personal recommendation would be to dual boot for now but to buy Intel or an AMD APU for your next machine and get an Nvidia card (Rtx 2000 series or better) for the vm. Run Linux off the integrated graphics. That’s just me.

    I personally have Threadripper and it works great. Mostly use it for Adobe. I’m able to give it 16 core/32 thread, 32 gb ram, and it screams. Next step is to get a dedicated NVMe.

    Good luck.