* License cost
* HDD / SSD storage space
* OS performance
* They might not agree with the EULA
* Or simply because they just don't don't like Windows.
Incidentally my "game time" these days is much more likely to be on my 486 PC, Atari 800 or Dreamcast. I don't have much time to game so being able to jump in immediately and not be interrupted trumps the latest-and-greatest blingy graphics any day.
A large part of my "game time" is on emulated PS2, so I guess I'm way younger than you. :)
Also, rebooting takes ages. My Linux boot time might be measured in seconds, but I'm always in the middle of some kind of work and I use my running system to maintain continuity. It's a major pain in the arse to reboot, so I do it rarely.
It takes me a good 20m to reboot. 5m for the actual reboot and 15m to check to see if I'll lose any work.
Also - I tend to multitask. Dip into games, dip into work, browsing etc. It's not a concerted change of mode so closing one side of my mind down for a single purpose just doesn't work for me.
If you use the computer for multiple purposes, rebooting to play a game will disrupt your environment way too much.
While I do dual boot, I have booted Windows like 2 times this year. The rest, I played ported games. There are a lot of them.
Also, you'll need two graphics adapters for this.
And I think it's been catching on a lot more now that both Intel offers VT-d standard in most of it's chips. So does AMD with its SVM equivalent.
I like this approach Valve is taking better than resorting to VMs though. I'll probably continue to use my GPU passthrough setup for now but when the game compatibility on this gets better I'll likely switch.
Also novidia is known to block driver installs from a VM because “you should be using a professional GPU for that” but there are ways to trick the installer.
If I imagine the average PC gamer, I don't think they would be able to troubleshoot any problems. Once you get into setting up storage pools (libvirt) or having to edit the libvirt XML file (want to have host native Audio?) and of course installing all those drivers for optimal performance (digging up the correct CD image and mounting it is not trivial either.
edit: here's a receipe: https://github.com/joeknock90/Single-GPU-Passthrough
what host os, guest os, virtualization stack (vmware??), video card combo is working for you?
Cheers.
[1] - https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/9/1355103931983...
When it's being powered on again, it just loads that state from the hard drive, rather than running a boot process, which results in significantly better boot times. It however also has drawbacks. It can cause instabilities and it leaves the hard drive in some unworkable state.
The latter is why most people will want to turn this feature off when dual booting. If you don't turn it off and you only have one hard drive with partitions for each OS, you're actually not going to be able to boot Linux (or install it in the first place).
If you have physically separate hard drives, you're not going to be able to access files on your Windows drive, which if it's a gaming-only system might not be as important, but otherwise is still kind of handy.