I’ve been dual booting Linux and windows for about two years now, but in those two years, I have never booted into windows, except by mistake.
This made me think about removing windows and just saving that wasted space for Linux. I only ever dual booted for the off chance the peer pressure to play anti cheat games was too great, but so far it hasn’t.
For the off chance where I want to play a game that doesn’t run well on Linux, is it a good idea to do that via VM instead of dual boot, or is it too much hassle? Will there be performance hit or any issues with those games?
I wanted to go the VM route about a year ago, but I ended up deciding that it was just too much hassle and have kept my Windows dual boot for the extremely rare occasions that I need to use it.
I started out using the GTX 770 from my previous PC as the secondary graphics card to pass through to the VM - which is a lot easier than doing it with a single graphics card - but given how often I actually need to use Windows, I didn’t feel particularly comfortable with the extra power use.
So I decided I’d have a go at single GPU passthrough - which took me probably about six months of on/off (mostly off, admittedly) tweaking to get to a usable state. The first time I managed to boot Windows from my Linux install, I nearly cried. After a while fiddling with it, I decided that, as technologically awesome as it is, it really wasn’t that much different than running it on bare metal. The straw that broke the camel’s back was my inability to get Windows to gracefully hand the GPU back to Linux, despite the fact that it should have been as simple as reversing the steps to give Windows the GPU in the first place.