Which is the better option + spinning a vm is possible and ltsc the only issue is I have to repirte a windows license for ltsc(and according to Microsoft ltsc was mostly designed for embedded systems) thanks for any help and I decided to post it on the linux community bcs I couldn’t find a suitable place to post it and this is related to linux but man I love linux tho and if I go with the jumpship method I have to sadly leave some games behind like roblox (it’s fine due to some moderation issues bad games etc etc but ngl its a fun game ik sober exists but i kinda dont wanna use a android emulator to play roblox i could use it since its our only option for linux)
I’m a fan of dual booting AND using a passthrough VM. It’s easiest to set up if your machine has two NVMe slots and you put each OS on its own drive. This way you can pass the Windows NVMe through to the VM directly.
The advantage of this configuration is that you get the convenience of not needing to reboot to run some Windows specific software, but if you need to run software that doesn’t play nice with virtualization (maybe a program has too large a performance hit with virtualization, or software you want to run doesn’t support virtualized systems, like some anticheat-enabled games), you can always reboot to your same Windows installation directly.
Interesting, I’ve never heard of softwares that don’t support virtualized systems, I mean how would they… know?
I don’t know exactly, but it’s apparently a thing. Some game anti-cheat software such as Easy Anti-Cheat will give you an error message saying something along the lines of “Virtual machines are not supported.” Some are easy to bypass by just tweaking your VM config, others not so much.
In some cases they look for generic virtual hw devices, in other cases things like available cpu flags or BIOS version.
There are ways to hide it though:
https://github.com/zhaodice/qemu-anti-detection
https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/how-do-i-hide-the-fact-to-windows-that-it-runs-in-a-vm.115627/
I can see that. I nuked my Windows partition years ago, though. Honestly, if I find a software is jerk enough to block virtualization, I don’t find it worth using.
Fair enough! I think it’s more common for games to do that, but sometimes I had trouble with software on Windows that used virtualization elements themself. I probably just didn’t properly configure HyperV settings, but I know nested virtualization can be tricky.
For me it’s also because I’m on a laptop, and my Windows VM relies on me passing through an external GPU over TB3 but my laptops’ dedicated GPU has no connection to a display, so it would be tricky to try and do GPU passthrough on the VM if I were on the go. I like being able to boot Windows on the go to edit photos in Lightroom, for example, but otherwise I’d prefer to run the Linux host and use the Windows VM only as needed.
Yeh, I think it has to do with some CPU topology crap. I have it working pretty well, luckily - I once had an old Virtualbox VM with MacOS that I needed, and I was able to boot it in my Windows VM.
With Lightroom, you’re right on that. Honestly, the state of FOSS image editors is a bit ridiculous, especially considering how good FOSS vector editors like Inkscape are these days compared to their commercial, proprietary counterparts.