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Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

The main things keeping me from using Linux as a daily driver are:

1) My personal desktop has Windows for games

2) My laptops (personal and work) are Macs because Apple simply makes the best laptops

When I've dual-booted in the past it's been a huge pain, and I didn't end up bothering to switch to Linux very often in practice anyway. Linux laptops exist, but they tend to be spotty in terms of build-quality and power. Gaming on Linux can technically be done, but I don't want my expensive machine to be unable to play some things because of the OS.

There are lots of little things, most of which could be overcome with effort, but these days I'd rather use my devices than tinker with them most of the time.

I guess I just wish I had an excuse to use something like Elementary or PopOS. I would if I had an a) desktop that b) was mainly for projects. But alas, I don't.

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On the desktop front, I've been hearing about virtualizing windows on Linux with a framebuffer that maps directly to the GPU. Then you get to keep something like 95% performance. I forget what it's called, but I remember seeing a subreddit for it. FBIO?

https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/

I wasn't talking about performance, I was talking about compatibility with games. Sorry if that wasn't clear; I've edited.

Valve has been doing amazing things in this space, but for now my understanding is that it's more of a "most games will work pretty well" scenario, which is not really what I want for my primary games machine.

Well thats the perk, you get games compatibility. Windows runs in a window with direct access to the GPU. I primary Windows because of games and music software, and I'm looking forward to trying it out.

As another comment points out, its called VFIO. From that subreddit: "VFIO stands for Virtual Function I/O. VFIO is a device driver that is used to assign devices to virtual machines. One of the most common uses of vfio is setting up a virtual machine with full access to a dedicated GPU. This enables near-bare-metal gaming performance in a Windows VM, offering a great alternative to dual-booting"

That seems to imply that it can use the same GPU as the host? I thought a dedicated one was required (not just a 'common use').

AFAIK, for the setup they're talking about, you do need a dedicated GPU. You blacklist it on the host, and pass it through to the windows VM.

I haven't worked in windows space in awhile though, and state changes rapidly, so there may be other options now that utilize a single GPU across host and vm without losing performance.

Do G-Sync/Freesync still work in a setup like this?

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