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Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

Why would this be attractive to SWEs? Seems like something that would be more relevant to gamers.

Half of the SWEs I work with don’t game.

My workstation is set up like this, with one giant LVM pool for storage and two GPUs, it gives a few advantages:

* Can run two OS at one time, each with half the resources * Can run one with full resources if needed * Can have multiple linux and windows installs * Can have snapshots of installs * Takes around 5-10 seconds to swap one of the running installs for a different install * Can run headless VMs on a core or two while doing all the above, ie a test runner or similar service if needed

I use a 49" ultrawide with PBP, have one GPU connected to each side, so the booted installs automatically appear side to side, and Synergy to make mouse movement seamless, etc, etc

It took a little work to set up, but I've worked this way for ~ 3 years now and never had to think about the setup after the initial time investment, and during upgrades. Highly recommend it.

I definitely can see the advantage for a small team for having a single large machine with multiple GPUs, and letting them sit at a thin workspace and "Check out" whatever install they want to use, how much CPU power and RAM they need, etc, clone and duplicate installs and get a copy with their personal files in home, ready to go, and can check out larger slices of the machine when they have more CPU/GPU intensive tasks, that's probably my ideal office machine, after using my solo workstation for a while

Any guide on this? I would love MacOS and Windows side by side.

The arch linux wiki page [1] is a good place to start (Note you don't have to use arch for the host to get value out of the page, I use nixos), and/or the macos repo [2] (Or maybe this newer one [3])

The only real hurdle hardware wise is your IOMMU groups and your CPU compatibility, if you have a moderately modern system it should be a problem.

I also have a couple of inexpensive PCIe USB cards that I pass through to the guests for direct USB access, highly recommended.

The guides will use qcow2 images or pass through a block device, as I mentioned I have a giant LVM pool, I just create lvs for each vm and pass the volume through to the vm as a disk , and let the vm handle it. In the host you can use kpartx to bind and mount the partitions if you ever need to open them up.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM...

[2] https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM

[3] https://github.com/yoonsikp/macos-kvm-pci-passthrough

You don't do this just because you like playing games. You do this because you're primarily an IT dork who likes building crazy setups. Maybe you'll play a few games with your friends on it later.

This is like the Arch Linux of computer hardware. You don't install Arch Linux to get shit done. You do it because you like building and configuring, and to learn about Linux.

Wrong point about Arch though. You can get a lot of shit done with Arch since it has the AUR and is not forcing you to reinstall anything from scratch from an old distro and kernel combo every 2 years.

And it doesn't surprise you with something - or some combination of things - that are installed. If you need it, you put it there, otherwise it's not in your way.

I'm on Mac at the moment and frequently pine for Arch. 'What on Earth just happened...', 'What did that...', 'What is this...', 'Well that wouldn't have happened on Arch.'

People claim Mac 'just works' because of out-of-the-box readiness, well I'd say in contrast Arch 'still works' or 'keeps working': it does what you tell it and if you don't tell it to change, it stays working in the same way.

I am starting to get somewhat disenchanted with the whole “the Mac just works” thing. I suppose their recent dip in QA effort is to blame to some extent. But also, whenever something doesn’t work, and Apple doesn’t care enough to fix it —- tough luck. On Linux you at least have options if you’re a technical person and are not afraid of the command line.

I just wish I could pay a company that would have engineers and designers building an actual user-friendly, stable OS on top of Linux. Mac OS, with all its faults, is still miles ahead in terms of usability and polish.

Fair. I don't install Arch to get stuff done, I decided to stick with debian derivatives and xfce for that, but not everyone is the same.

The parent comment was likely referring to using the clients as workstations, not necessarily gaming computers. Though the cost of this server and the fiber optic usb peripherals is crazy. One of those fiber usb repeaters costs as much as a high end computer.

> One of those fiber usb repeaters costs as much as a high end computer.

Not if you "borrowed them from work for testing"...

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