I use a Windows and Arch dualboot, but I’m looking to escape Microsoft. I’ve heard good things about both Fedora and Pop!_OS. I’m your average Arch user; I play video games and code. Are Windows VMs suitable for games like Call of Duty on such distros ?
Have you considered Mint? I tried PopOS but found the support wasn’t great. Mint is also based on Ubuntu but adds extra functionality and skips some of the dumb stuff Canonical is pushing (i.e. snaps for everything).
As far as games: VM’s are not really a good bet unless maybe you’ve got multiple video chips and are willing to invest time in getting GPU passthrough working (and then you really haven’t escaped Microsoft so why not just dual-boot).
I’ve found that games on Linux (particularly Steam games) with Proton are pretty damn good and only getting better over time. Valve has put a lot of work into that with the Steam Deck (which also runs on Linux) and the non-valve versions also sometimes cover stuff that can’t (like certain copy protections).
Your can see the rating for games on Linux with Proton here
Just reaffirming that my experience getting Activision/Blizzard stuff working on Linux has been mixed. I played older games that weren’t that GPU demanding, Hearthstone & Starcraft II, but the launcher would break pretty much every other update.
Mint is a great & everything works pretty much out of the box.
My understanding is that Fedora works pretty well for people gaming, GloriousEggroll, the guy that puts out the GE proton patches, contributes to Fedora, I think. Though you might want to check out NobaraLinux it is based on Feodra, but ships with additional goodies for gamers: Nvidia driver support, kernel patches, Discord, etc. https://nobaraproject.org/
Anything that you launch through Steam should also work, irrespective of your OS.
My understanding is Nobara is made by GloriousEggroll, which is why it’s so good for gaming. It worked really well for me except for the fact that some games didn’t like the hybrid Nvidia graphics on my laptop. I ended up swapping to Pop because of that, and everything works like a charm. I’d rather be on Nobara tho. I really don’t like Pop’s desktop environment.
You can probably install a different desktop environment for pop, usually it’s just a command and then there’s a menu in the corner of your login page where you can change the desktop environment.
You can, but can you do accelerated graphics within the VM environment?
My last foray into this with KVM/Qemu (the system native to Linux) was that accelerated graphics virtualization was still pretty twitchy, requiring various protocols which were still a bit immature (libvf, looking glass) or only available on a subset of hardware (vGPU,SR-IOV)
The docs on single GPU passthrough indicate one must detach from the host and assign to the guest (and rely on SSH or remote-screen apps etc to control the host).
PCI passthrough is the best option I’ve heard but basically involved the Linux host using the lower-powered GPU (possibly an integrated graphics chip) and then the guest given passthrough access to the gaming card.
If you’ve got good documentation on how to do this less painfully, I’d love to give it another shot. I’m pretty happy with the Proton performance on most stuff but there’s definitely a few games that I’d love to move to a virtual system if it performs well
Using KVM, you can use do full GPU pass through to any OS from your host without a need for a second GPU (including integrated graphics).
Works with AMD and nvidia cards, I’ve even done this with a macOS VM.
Here’s a guide that’s the easiest I’ve found to follow. It includes some automated scripts.
https://github.com/BigAnteater/KVM-GPU-Passthrough - this guide is for Arch Linux, but the scripts and configs should work the same on any OS, you’ll just need to make sure the correct packages are installed.
Like you mentioned, there are some hardware requirements to do this, but most modern hardware supports it. Also, if you are running the VM then using SSH to control your host is probably your only option, but shutting down your VM should take you back to your display manager so there’s no rebooting.
I used this set up to play warzone for a while, performance was just as good as windows on bare metal.
Some notes from my experience:
- if you upgrade your host’s kernel, then reboot before trying to start your VM.
2 There are 2 scripts that will be built for you, vfio-startup and vfio-teardown. They will unload and reload kernel modules as needed so you’ll want to check if they are needed. My nvidia drivers are built into the kernel, so I couldn’t unload them, which stalled the VM startup.
- It might take some trial and error, if your VM doesn’t start after you attach the GPU then check the logs under /var/log/libvirt (or wherever your libvirt logs to)
If you don’t mind the Red Hat shit, Fedora.
I’m looking to escape Microsoft … Windows VM … Call of Duty
You’re not escaping Microsoft when putting Microsoft Windows in a VM and you’re not escaping Microsoft either when playing a game series that will be owned by Microsoft within the next few months.
To second what others have said: VM’s aren’t suitable for gaming regrettably.
PopOS is a rather reliable distro, and I personally have loved the window tiling features they added, but it should be noted that they only have LTS from a year ago at the moment. I think that’s just while they work on their new desktop environment, but the older packages might be a tad bit of a transition coming from Arch.
Why not stay with Arch? Fedora has an uncertain Future due to RedHat. Anything else is probably fine, but it depends on what you want to achieve.
Regarding VM gaming it is working fine for the most part, but there are a few anti cheat engines which block VMs so your milage will vary (Escape from Tarkov, Rainbow Six Siege and I think Valorant don’t work, most other games do last time I checked). Keep in mind you need a mainboard which plays nice with IOMMU, a CPU with enough cores and you probably want two graphics cards. One dedicated for passthrough. If you don’t have a purpose built computer for this your results might not be great.
Playing Windows games in a Windows VM is not escaping Microsoft though, but others already said that.
I concure, i had pop os with virtual machines for windows via kvm/qemu. Total noob but i got it to work somehow. Anyway several games i couldnt play due to anti cheat, i had destiny 2 on my steam account that i cant play do to this problem as i risk my account being banned just for having linux. Eventually after some tinkering i broke my pop os(wanted to use lightdm and lighter desktop enviornment to save ram/cpu).
Only use windows vm for non linux friendly titles i have already paid for. Everything else will be via linux vm for gaming. Since vm is my goto i like keeping my host computer minimum. Also i prefer hdmi audio for my vms as my switch box has an toslink(fiber optic) audio out. Keeps the audio part super easy to add using astros or equivilant gear that have optical support.
