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 ?
I’ve been happily running Fedora Workstation for about 2 years on several devices and desktop environments. Up until the RedHat controversy, I would recommend Fedora. But you should probably try Pop!_OS first. It seems to be easier to use and Ubuntu compatible.
PopOS. They put ALOT of work into drivers for GPU’s whereas Fedora don’t. Also, Fedora is Red Hat so don’t use them. They are evil.
Better to be Ubuntu based like PopOS
I don’t get it, which work? On debian I run apt install nvidia-driver and everything works flawlessly. What do the pop_os driver do better? A GUI for that?
I recently moved from win 10 to Pop os for work related stuff, also I have arch on another ,free time pc, and Mint on my old home server-ish pc.
Pop is pretty good, all necessary stuff is preinstalled, I like how it works out of the box. Games run smoothly, not as smooth as on win but I can give up 5 fps for not being MS(lave)
Mint has more preinstalled packages, feels more bulky but runs ,smoother, on old laptop. Also the ui is more like windows
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.
