Linux VM gaming = ban?

[Marvin_The_Robot]

Cosmic OS looks like it's going to be a little like POP OS.

 

I want to test out playing games on steam to see if Cosmic OS or Steam OS will have any difference in performance. 

 

To do this I was planing on spinning up some Proxmox VM's of each and trying them out.

 

Has anyone run into issues running a linux like this in a Proxmox VM and running games?

(Pc has a 10700ka and 3080 tuf)

 

Will an anticheat ban me if I use Linux in a VM to play a game?

[Guest]

Cosmic OS? Do you mean the new Cosmic Desktop Environment that's going to be used by PopOS as I have never heard of Cosmic OS.

Linux in a VM should be fine, your biggest issue will probably be performance and possibly some compatibility issues. If you are looking to test performance and compatibility a VM may be a bad option for this. Typically in scenarios like this you want to passthrough a full GPU and pin/dedicate resources to the VM, but this still won't fully represent performance on your hardware.

 

Windows Gaming in a VM however is considered a bannable offense by some AntiCheat Systems.

[Marvin_The_Robot]

7 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

Cosmic OS? Do you mean the new Cosmic Desktop Environment that's going to be used by PopOS as I have never heard of Cosmic OS.

Linux in a VM should be fine, your biggest issue will probably be performance and possibly some compatibility issues. If you are looking to test performance and compatibility a VM may be a bad option for this. Typically in scenarios like this you want to passthrough a full GPU and pin/dedicate resources to the VM, but this still won't fully represent performance on your hardware.

 

Windows Gaming in a VM however is considered a bannable offense by some AntiCheat Systems.

Yes, Cosmic Desktop is what I meant.

 

I mostly want to run them in a vm to compare Steam OS, Cosmic Desktop and maybe Ubuntu.

 

Trying to find a good stepping stone away from Windows, That will still allow me to play my steam games easily. 

[Guest]

11 minutes ago, Marvin_The_Robot said:

Yes, Cosmic Desktop is what I meant.

 

I mostly want to run them in a vm to compare Steam OS, Cosmic Desktop and maybe Ubuntu.

 

Trying to find a good stepping stone away from Windows, That will still allow me to play my steam games easily. 

SteamOS is specifically designed for the Steam Deck. There are community projects that repackage it for desktop use but it is known to be problematic with NVIDIA. The Steam Deck is a all AMD handheld so.

 

PopOS is built on Ubuntu LTS. The Biggest difference will be the Desktop Environment and the lack of Snaps on PopOS.

Snaps are known to be somewhat problematic and resource heavy, if it is something you need you can always add support later.

 

So out of your three I would just recommend trying PopOS, which also has a NVIDIA ISO, which can help you get going quicker.

 

Do be aware Cosmic Desktop is still in Alpha and the latest Stable version of PopOS still ships the GNOME Desktop. While there is some hint that we may see a stable release later this year, it will still be a unfinished project. The next testing phase for Epoch 2 wont be for another year which may or may not reach near completion status.
Using Cosmic right now means being a Early Adopter, expect bugs and missing features.

[scrumptious starfruit]

Whether playing in Linux or a VM triggers a game's anti-cheat measures depends on each individual anti-cheat system. If you have accounts in games you really care about, I'd definitely see what info you can dig up about those systems before doing it, better be safe than sorry.

 

Agree on the performance issues as well - VMs can be close to native performance if they are properly tuned but will practically always have at least a small penalty, and if they aren't properly tuned then the performance hit can be pretty big. It's a deep rabbit hole, if you have a spare drive to try distros baremetal that might be better if you're just trying to test them before deciding on a more permanent setup. Performance testing is complex enough without adding a VM layer to it.

 

Honestly I wouldn't worry about performance too much, getting the games to work reliably will be most of the battle so a distro that makes that part easy is more important than getting an extra fps or two. If you really want to maximize the performance, there are plenty of knobs you can play with which will have equal/more influence than the distro would anyway.

[WindirBear]

On 8/14/2024 at 3:29 AM, Nayr438 said:

Cosmic OS? Do you mean the new Cosmic Desktop Environment that's going to be used by PopOS as I have never heard of Cosmic OS.

Linux in a VM should be fine, your biggest issue will probably be performance and possibly some compatibility issues. If you are looking to test performance and compatibility a VM may be a bad option for this. Typically in scenarios like this you want to passthrough a full GPU and pin/dedicate resources to the VM, but this still won't fully represent performance on your hardware.

 

Windows Gaming in a VM however is considered a bannable offense by some AntiCheat Systems.

 I read "bananable offense"

[Eigenvektor]

On 8/14/2024 at 12:41 PM, Marvin_The_Robot said:

I mostly want to run them in a vm to compare Steam OS, Cosmic Desktop and maybe Ubuntu.

Cosmic is simply a new desktop environment (DE), not a separate OS. So what you're actually comparing is Steam OS, Pop!_OS and Ubuntu. Cosmic is an early alpha version, i.e. not something you should be using when trying to compare performance between distributions. Use it if you want to have an early look at the new DE, not when trying to decide which distribution is best for you.

 

Gaming in a VM means fiddling around with GPU passthrough, otherwise you won't have any 3D acceleration. Plus running in a VM always carries the risk of triggering anti-cheat. I'd rather set aside a small partition or second disk and dual boot. That's less work and will give you a more realistic look at how it performs on your hardware. Though keep in mind that some anti-cheat can react badly to Linux, even without virtualization in the mix!

 

That said, performance differences between different distributions are likely negligible and will mostly come down to which kernel version they come with out of the box. Results shift around every now and then, depending on which distributions updates at what time. Newer versions generally tend to improve hardware support (e.g. couldn't use ray tracing on AMD until some recent-ish kernel update, couldn't use VRR until some recent-ish Gnome update, …).

 

Select a distribution you're comfortable with and don't worry about minor performance differences. You're not going to see some magic 20% uplift in one over the other.