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Comment by Garlef | Hacker News Reader

I guess installing windows is more work than running a VM

... and more invasive

More work than using custom builds of everything on the Linux host?

It’s just the kernel and virtualization stack that are custom. Dual booting is annoying as you lose access to your entire desktop environment. Want to tab out of your game and check your email client? Well you can’t unless you maintain another email on the Windows partition that you only want to use for running a game anyway. If you spend any significant amount of time gaming you just end up getting dragged away from Linux where you want to be. I was dual booting for a while and it was fine for a focused Skyrim session here and there but when I started playing an mmo that I was in and out of constantly it was very inconvenient to not have access to my Linux desktop environment while I was idling in the city for hours.

With lookingglass nowadays it practically feels like just running a windows game on Linux. I used a vfio setup for years before Linux gaming support was good and I had to switch monitors inputs and toggle my kvm whenever I launched a game and it was still better than dual booting. There wasn’t kernel anticheat back then though so i didn’t have to muck with the kernel and uefi.

Not sure if it's still the case in the 2020's, but back in the 2010's I had no end of issues with Windows deciding to either fuck up the dualboot so nothing would load or overwrite it entirely and leave it as Windows only.

I think I probably switched off dual booting to vfio around 2015. Before that for dual boot I had just followed the arch wiki and used two separate drives, using grub for booting both windows and arch. I don’t remember having issues with dual boot but setting up vfio for gaming was still very fresh at the time and was not trivial for me.

EDIT: looks like it was 2016 i stopped dual booting and switched to vfio because I built a new computer for it a year later https://imgur.com/gallery/battlestation-4BuoZ Ironically reading that back I have just recently started getting into film photography.

I used vfio in the past, and it's not true that setups like vfio or custom kernel/virtualization "just" work. For starters, custom setups need management. There are even latest generation GPUs whose drivers are not fully VFIO compatible.

VFIO had a host of problems that are rarely mentioned, because VFIO "just" works: power management, card driver, compatibility, audio passthrough or maybe not, USB passthrough or maybe not, stuttering, and so on.

VFIO is in a significantly better place than it was 10 years ago though. Proper IOMMU groups are more common on motherboards, flashing gpu bios less necessary, etc. and most importantly the community is bigger and older so there is a more knowledge about parts compatibility and vfio setup.

That said it’s almost entirely unnecessary with the state of Linux gaming now.

Better or not, even the latest generation AMD GPUs don't automatically guarantee a very stable VFIO, which makes the technology still immature.

Sure, in 10 years we’ve gone from bleeding edge, with server/workstation motherboards being necessary, to immature, with having to do a little homework on which consumer hardware to buy. It’s not like VFIO is something for the general public anyway.

>It’s just the kernel and virtualization stack that are custom.

That "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Maintaining a customized system is hardly zero effort. Speaking for myself, there's no way I'd ever consider something like this, because I know sooner or later a system update is going to do something weird that I'll have to figure out how to fix. I'd rather just buy a second computer just to run those specific games. The other person admits they need a second GPU to support this use case anyway, so it's not even like you're saving that much money.

>Want to tab out of your game and check your email client?

I have a phone, and a tablet, and a laptop (besides the desktop). I'm not exactly hurting for ways to check my messages or look something up quickly.

Yeah that’s fine, i personally didn’t spend many hours tweaking my dotfiles in Linux just to spend half my time in an operating system that i hate that spies on me and doesnt have my stuff in it. I wouldn’t maintain my own custom kernel either just to bypass anticheat, i don’t buy those games.

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