I want to get into Arch Linux, but I don’t have that much experience and I feel like it’ll be easier to set it up in a virtual machine rathen than dual booting, I’ve used Oracle VirtualBox before but it’s very laggy. Are there any other VMs that aren’t as laggy, or do I just have a hardware issue?
If your computer is a Linux, QEMU/KVM with libvirtd is great. If you run a Windows 10 or higher, HyperV works great, you should also be able to grab a VMware Player if it’s still free. For Mac you have Parallels I believe.
Gnome Boxes is also great for simple stuff on Linux. Besides there is virt-manager as GUI for libvirt. On macOS UTM is a good free and open source tool.
Sorry I meant virt-manager yeah, I think it is part of libvirtd
I’ll try it
HyperV doesn’t let you adjust the screen size does it? I tried to use it for work but that held me back
I believe you need to install the drivers for it. Something similar to vmwaretools but for hyperv.
Oh okay, I couldn’t even find any screen settings, so I assumed it was just not possible. Thanks, I’ll look into it :)
I’d say VirtualBox is still your best bet b/c of its well-polished user interface - ie unless you plan to play games.
very laggy
Had you installed “extension pack” & “guest additions”? If not, please do! They make a world of difference.
Grab them for the version you’ve installed from VirtualBox downloads directory. Install
Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-x.y.z.vbox-extpackon your machine andVBoxGuestAdditions_x.y.z.isoon your VM.For example, for version 7.0.10:
HTH
I’ve never tried the extension pack, but I do have the guest additions. How do you install it?
Here’s a decent guide on how to do it for an Ubuntu VM (instructions should apply to Arch too.) Since you’ll be manually downloading guest-additions, just skip the “prerequisites” section.
An here’s a guide on how to install the extension pack.
Pray, post here if you run into any troubles (you shouldn’t ✌️.)
Thank you! I’ll be back if I run into some trouble. :D
Hello, no I haven’t installed the packs yet. Will do so, thank you.
You used VBox on Windows, huh? Because it works great on Linux and is absolute garbage on Windows. The distro is secondary here. Try VMWare Workstation Player, there’s a free version. Works way better in my experience. As for Arch: Look at Garuda Linux, then try to replicate it on EndeavourOS and you’ll know pretty much everything about customizations you need.
alright, thank you
Desktop usage is almost always going to feel laggy in a VM because you don’t have a real GPU inside the VM and it will fallback to some non-accelerated framebuffer mode. There are some GPU virtualization solutions, for example QEMU has
virglthat offers 3D acceleration, but in my experience it’s buggy/not ready and doesn’t offer near bare metal performance.The only way to get near bare metal graphical performance in a VM is by using PCI pass through of an entire GPU, but that requires an extra GPU, is non-trivial to setup and comes with a lot of caveats.
VM has an option to enable GPU acceleration iirc, would that solve it?
Probably not. There are no implementations that I’m aware of that work well on a Linux guest.
Go to eBay and search “thin clients” - you can get one for about $30, install arch and go nuts.
Use KVM and virt manager instead of Virtual box because KVM gives your VM direct access to the bare metal so it runs way better. Virtualbox is running your VM via an abstraction layer which adds overhead and reduces performance.
Just Google how to install KVM on your distro.
Thank you
Do you have prior Linux experience apart from experimenting with Arch in Virtualbox?
I’ve used Pop_OS!, Mint and a little bit of Ubuntu before
I recommend putting Fedora with your preferred DE on a thumbstick and experimenting with that.
You should use Debian.
