Questions before making the full-time switch to linux

Puffhead · October 26, 2019

Hi guys! Looking to switch to linux full time but I'd like to get some input on how to manage the following things that I think may cause me some issues. Any advice for overcoming these hurdles would be appreciated.

For context, my hardware:
9900k
32GB DDR4
2060
1TB NVME SSD
500GB SSD for games
8TB HDD Photo/Data Drive
1TB HDD Drive for gameplay videos/misc data

Caveats:
I'm a photographer. I need windows software (not necessarily the adobe stuff). This is a requirement. In my opinion, the open source alternatives aren't that good, so I'll need to figure out how to virtualize a few programs. Likely Affinity Photo and ACDSee. Virtualbox performance worries me. Every time I virtualize windows 10 on windows 10, it's a stuterry mess. Then again that was all with vbox defaults, can this be made *much* better with GPU passthrough?

For offsite backups, I've been using backblaze at $6 a month to backup 5TB of data off that single 8TB drive. They only allow you do back up unlimited data if it's a regular drive plugged in to mac/windows. I feel bad trying to find a way around this, but can't justify their B2 yet at $25/month. Is there a creative way to still back up that drive through the backblaze software in a windows VM?

That one 8TB drive I have is a fully encrypted with veracrypt NTFS container, and I need full access to it. Will a linux distro be able to handle that filesystem?

I've really enjoyed shadowplay and it's replay feature for recording games, hows the OBS buffer replay handle feature as a substitute?

Peripherals:
Wireless Logitech G602 Mouse
Wireless Corsair Void RGB
Corsair K70 Keyboard

Games I play:
CSGO - Linux compatible
BF5 - Linux compatible
Rocket League - Linux compatible
Garrys Mod - Linux compatible
Black ops 3 - Not compatible
Apex Legends - Not compatible
The new CoD MW - Not compatible

Sauron · October 26, 2019

KVM definitely offers much better performance than Virtualbox, in fact it's almost as fast as native hardware. The difference is that Virtualbox can't access the hardware directly through the kernel and needs to emulate its own gpu.

You should check out this youtube channel though, a surprising amount of photography work can be done on Linux without needing a virtual machine https://www.youtube.com/user/MiltonPhoto/videos

1 hour ago, Puffhead said:

Black ops 3 - Not compatible
Apex Legends - Not compatible
The new CoD MW - Not compatible

These can probably be made to run on Linux with proton. Performance may not be the best but it should be decent.

1 hour ago, Puffhead said:

Is there a creative way to still back up that drive through the backblaze software in a windows VM?

Yes, you can just give that VM access to the folder(s) you want to backup. Personally I wouldn't use a service that requires OS dependent software to make my backups though.