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Comment by exceptione | Hacker News Reader

Pro tip: run Linux on host, run Windows in a vm for just those applications you need to run on Win.

That way you contain the inherent mess that a Windows install will eventually devolve into. You also get the ability to snapshot states of your windows install, which makes it possible to mess around a bit and then roll back to a previous state.

You didn't tell what Windows software you want to run, but depending on your needs you could even do a pci-passthrough in this setup.

I do not recommend Ansible as someone else did. You will spend your days fighting a mix of yaml and Jinja. You will end up looking at Python errors because there are no static types. Never again.

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Some software, mostly multiplayer games with anti-cheat but also RDR2 singleplayer, attempt to detect VMs. Probably because cheaters use them. I love my pci passthrough setup but these anticheats are a pain.

Hopefully not relevant for uni work, but still worth mentioning.

pubg recently also started to kick me for detecting a vm. currently am using two separate windows installations (one native, one in a vm). will try to switch to one installation that can be used for both usecases, but this will cause headache with drivers, or some that is tied to certain hardware ids (copy protection)

This may actually be relevant if OP has to take remote exams with mandatory invasive proctoring software :/ Although I'm not sure if these attempt to detect VMs.

They can and do refuse to work if they detect they're running in a VM.

Ansible can be fine, but the errors are indeed cryptic.

If anyone is thinking about using ansible, I would suggest approaching it like a software project.

Define specialised roles, create test playbooks for those individual roles, use these roles to compose more complex playbooks, and offload logic to custom ansible modules that are written in python. This way you catch template problems early and won't wrestle with heavy logic in the template or playbook layer.

I have used Ansible for my Windows desktop setup for several years now, and I haven't fought those things in it. It has been pretty straightforward as I'm mostly just installing software and pulling some configs and scripts down.

> That way you contain the inherent mess that a Windows install will eventually devolve into.

Came here to say exactly this, and lo, top comment.

Don't let windows anywhere near you actual hardware.

Anything what needs to touch hardware is not going to work.

Not true, usb and pci passthrough is a thing.

Works with very narrow set of hardware when stars align correctly and there is not too many spots on the Sun. Usually utterly useless in practice

VMware Workstation passthoughs are very reliable for me. I can't say the same for VirtualBox though.

My experience for generic Virtual Serial Port hardware

* MacOS Parallels - Abysmal performance, constant USB timeouts. Virtually useless

* Virtual box on Windows, emulating Windows - Able to detect device, but unable to talk to it.

* Virtual box on Linux emulating Windows - USB does not even detect.

I never had any problems with vbox usb passthru from lin.host to win.guest, so you might have a really specific case here, but I know there are loads of people running qemu on lin.host with all kinds of advanced hardware pass through configurations.

Thinking about it, if you have a very old motherboard the IOMMU layout might have hindered proper hardware separation.

But I doubt OP really need pass-through at all.

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