Hopefully some of this comes to Windows guests. One of the major issues right now is that Windows virtualisation isn’t great. VirtualBox has GPU problems, VMware requires a lot of messing about with kernel modules if you don’t use Ubuntu, if KVM/QEMU is able to make a smooth environment for Windows guests that’d help bring people in who still need Windows for the odd bit of software or two.
I remember there was a GPU driver for Windows but that seems to have stalled?
Edit: Cleared up why I think VMware is a bit of a mess.
Vmware requires a lot of messing around.
What are you going on about? VMware and Windows work just fine if you install vmware tools.
I’m talking about the installation process for VMware itself.
I had to help someone non-techy install VMware on Pop!_OS (the OS preinstalled by System76 on their hardware), and it required messing with the kernel modules which fails on Pop!_OS. It seems like VMware builds for a very specific version of Ubuntu which of course, means the kernel module building process fails when you use a kernel version that’s different to what Ubuntu has (which Pop!_OS does and maybe some other Ubuntu-based distros). Thankfully someone on GitHub maintains up-to-date patches for the VMware modules so I was able to guide him through there but this isn’t something someone new to Linux would want to do.
It’s not like simply installing it from a package manager, well unless you use Arch but I’m not putting this person who’s new to Linux on Arch when he just started using CLI.
If you need this frequently, I really suggest you look into GPU forwarding. I have a Windows VM setup with a second card and it works perfectly, I use it for games and CAD all the time. Figure out your iommu groups, pop a second card in your computer (and optionally a second nvme drive if you want max performance), and use virt-manager and the arch wiki to set it up.
For accessing the machine you can use a second monitor input, or you can get a window to the machine with looking glass or moonlight. I use moonlight as it lets me play games from my laptop on the couch, and looking glass was causing windows to crash sometimes.
It’s a bit of work to set it all up but when you’re done it should just be one XML file and maybe one modprobe.d config file.
I think I’ve been using this for over a year now and the single pain point I encountered in all that time was maybe that usb input hotplug isn’t supported, though there’s ways to fix that, but I haven’t bothered.
