I’m helping a family member build a pc. He wanted to use Windows because “Linux can’t play games” despite me having a perfectly good gaming laptop running Linux that runs all my games, even graphically intensive ones.
2 days later, no game has been played yet. We can’t even get steam to start. I even installed Arch on a sata ssd I donated just to verify the pc parts actually work (took less than an hour). It took 1 and a half days to even get the Windows 11 installer to get past like the 3rd screen.
Fucking fuck. Dealing with all this fucking bullshit is far worse than not being able to play a few trashy anticheat pay 2 win games. The anti Linux circlejerk is real.
Apparently there’s a way to run a vm from an actual disk partition, as long as you can be sure only the vm has access to the partition(s). I haven’t tried it myself yet though.
Works great on VirtualBox - essentially, create a ‘raw VMDK’, and set up a virtual machine with that. Back when I thought that Windows was still worth dual-booting, I used to have it installed ‘for real’, but also installed so that I could boot it via VB. I always used to run Windows Updates when it was started in VB - that prevented the updates from making any BIOS changes and fucking up my GRUB configuration. It was also handy for file sharing and such like. Had far fewer problems with Windows in general that way, too.
Eventually, I realised that gaming on Linux is just fine, and the work-arounds were less effort than stopping Windows from shitting the bed in a dual-boot configuration. That was years ago; Linux gaming has come on a long way since then, too.
VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename /path/to/file.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sda
https://docs.oracle.com/en/virtualization/virtualbox/6.0/admin/adv-storage-config.html
