Welp, it’s finally happened. Windows 10 has become so bloated, slow, and spooky that I finally have decided to bite the bullet and set up a VM on my linux Mint partition. Do you have any suggestions for a virtual machine? My PC is a relatively basic mid-range business laptop, 8gb of ram, no GPU, only a few years old. I’m a little concerned about performance impact, as I’ve heard that VMs take more system resources than the OS running natively. Any recommendations of software/configurations that would work best for me?
EDIT for clarity: The games i intend to run are, largely, older non-steam games. i obviously just use proton for all my steam games, but some weird older ones don’t have a steam release/i don’t have the steam version.
As someone who runs VMs, i suggest you dont. Ivd been doing it for about 2 years and i still have moments where lets say i want to expand my storage and a bork it, or accidently removed a virt selection on virt manager by mistake.
An easy solution. Run conty.
https://github.com/Kron4ek/Conty
It creates a virtualized arch linux with all the needs for gaming without having you worry about the heavy stuff. All the list of programs already on the list including other launchers for other games.
Here is a video explaining it.
With that kind of hardware, you’re not looking at any gaming in a vm, practically. Since you already have a Mint partition, just use that. Modern Wine will run practically anything that doesn’t have an invasive unsupported anticheat
Someone can correct me if I’m mistaken, but as far as I can tell VM gaming has become pointless in recent years.
Proton/Wine will let you run almost everything on Linux with the exception of some games with rootkit anti cheats, and you’re likely to be banned if you run the latter in a VM anyway.
Correct. I game a lot and I never have to worry about Linux compatibility anymore.
If you got sick of Windows, what do you expect from running it in a VM? A slow and bloated OS in a VM is still slow and bloated. Probably even slower, because it now runs with more constraints.
Probably that it will be a fresh install with only games installed
I wouldn’t virtualize windows with 8gb ram. Also, gaming on a VM normally is not possible, unless you want to pass a GPU to it, which isn’t possible on a laptop. I’d say dual boot. Have a your main linux system where you do your work stuff and a windows one for 2 games that don’t run on linux. Though, unless you play those few games, you’ll probably be fine even without windows, as most games tend to run fine on linux these days.
If you use steam I’d suggest you think about switching to bazzite. It’s made for gaming, and every steam game I’ve tried so far has worked flawlessly. I used to fiddle around with stuff to get some games working on arch, but after switching I was blown away with how easy gaming is on this distro.
I’ve been a Linux gamer for a few years now. I don’t have Windows at all. Between Steam’s “Steam Play” and Lutris, you can play most games without issue. To find out if the games you want to play will work on Linux, check https://www.protondb.com/ and https://aclist.github.io/. Good luck!
