I by now have wasted far too much time trying to setup a VM on my decently decked out machine (i5 13600KF, RTX 3080, 32GB DDR5, Win11 on a 4K Display) to run some kind of Linux in there that runs perfectly smooth - mostly for Development purposes.
So far I have tried all 3 major vm hosting softwares for windows (VMWare, Hyper V and Virtual Box) along side various (admittedly beginner friendly) distros (Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, Mint, …) yet I have not once gotten a System up and running with smooth animations and no notable input latency. Also I have of course turned on Hardware virtualization in my bios and benchmarks usually show that CPU performance seems to be where I expect it.
So I wanna ask the community what setup they are using under windows that just runs any kind of Linux smoothly and what point I may be missing.
Also installing Linux natively is not really an option for me since I want to be able to run Multiplayer games and I still consider myself a Linux beginner and don’t wanna commit to install Linux directly on my host machine yet.
You’ll bound to have some lag unless you’re doing GPU passthrough and connecting a dedicated monitor to the GPU. It’s because in most case the VM’s display viewer is not actually have a very good latency. You might get better latency by using another remote desktop viewer optimized for low latency, e.g. Sunshine in the linux side, and moonlight as the remote desktop client. Note that the improvements is probably pretty small anyway without gpu passthrough because rendering is still being done on CPU, so if you can do GPU passthough, it’ll surely improve latency even without using dedicated monitor.