VM or dual boot

[Harrison Robert]

Hi I'm currently building my first pc and I'm drifting towards linux as my OS as I really enjoy learning about computers and think it'd be a fun thing for me to do plus it just seems better then windows. That being said even though I can see linux gaming has come a long way I still want that safety net of gaming on windows as I would know any game I wanted to play would work unlike with linux where it seems it would probably work.

 

So my question is would you recommend dual booting or using a VM

 

I'm only running one graphics card so I'm not sure of the logistics of using a VM and I would rather not take the performance hit of using one if it is substantial or noticeable. However dual booting seems like a pain and since windows would only be for gaming, it also doesn't seem as practical or fun. I think my 2tb hard drive would negate the storage limitations of partitioning drives but it is still a factor.

Any opinions would be appreciated and sorry for the lack on conciseness.

 

Thank you  

[mahyar]

what games do you play?

[Tanaz]

Using Windows in a VM in Linux with a single GPU is possible but it is still quite buggy. In order for it to work basically your GPU moves to the Virtual OS (Windows 10) and you can't control your Linux environment unless you SSH in from a remote computer/phone or you restart your PC. If you have multiple drives I'd  suggest dualbooting but on seperate drives so that you have 2 different bootloaders. Otherwise Windows loves messing with GRUB and overwriting it every chance it gets. Another option is getting a cheap GPU like a GT 710 and using that as your "main" Linux GPU and you *should*  be able to pass through your more powerful GPU. If you do that the performance hit will be 5-10% at most which is worth the convinience IMO.

[exowo]

I use linux with a kernel based win10 vm for gaming. Practically no performance loss

[maplepants]

I’d recommend dual booting. It’ll be a bit annoying, but it’s much easier to maintain. Just be make sure you periodically hop into Windows to manually run updates. I’ve run into a couple of times where my Windows hasn’t been used in a month or two and it wants to spend an hour updating/restarting before it’ll let me do anything else.