Virtual windows 10 inside Linux

[seym56]

I currently dual boot Ubuntu and Win10. Is there a way to run the Win10 in a virtual window from inside the Ubuntu OS? I rarely need to run Windows and I hate having to reboot my PC just to do something in windows for 2 seconds. I will actually remote into a 2nd old pc when i need windows but that pc is close to 8 years old and falling apart and the lag is horrible. I'd love to just open a window in Linux and run the win10 partition in that window.

 

Some games like Star Citizen or other programs like Blue Stacks won't run on Linux.

[Bitter]

For games? It's not super easy and hardware dependent, for just normal programs like word processing and browser, virtualbox is pretty easy to use and can pass through network adapter and USB ports if configured correctly. If you need to passthrough hardware for like GPU accelerated tasks it's more complicated and hardware dependent.

[Eigenvektor]

1 hour ago, seym56 said:

I'd love to just open a window in Linux and run the win10 partition in that window.

While that's possible with VirtualBox, it's not the best idea. I've done it before, it requires creating a virtual machine, then editing its virtual disk to point to a physical disk/partition rather than a file.

 

The issue is that you're booting the same Windows installation on two different hardware configurations. Your physical hardware in case you're booting it directly and the virtual hardware, if booting it in VirtualBox. This will lead to Windows repairing its drivers each time you switch between those two modes. You also run into issues with the VirtualBox utilities, that aren't designed to run on physical hardware.

 

And yeah, as was said above, unless you have two GPUs to get GPU passthrough working, you won't have 3D acceleration, which is required for gaming.

 

For BlueStacks, there should be alternative Android emulators like Genymotion that run well on Linux. Alternatively you can use the "official" one that comes with Android Studio.

[Ralphred]

13 hours ago, seym56 said:

I'd love to just open a window in Linux and run the win10 partition in that window.

That's what I do. I have two windows VM's that share the same physical disk/partitions/files etc. When I boot one of them I get "WIndows in a window" which is easy for simple stuff - proprietary firmware updaters etc. The second VM has GPU passthrough set-up on it that works with games. I don't have any windows only games I'm playing ATM, but last time I used it it worked really well. It will break if I can force both to run at the same time, so I've never tried.

 

I'd set up a windows VM using qemu, with the VMM (Virtual Machine Manager) app from redhat to do the complicated stuff, just a simple install, check out what the performance is like.

If it's good them move on giving it a dedicate drive of it's own, and once that is good look into passthrough (if you feel the need).

Tip: When you move on from "making something work" to "making the next thing work" always make a config clone of the VM, so you don't have to start from scratch if it goes a bit wrong << this is how I got my "Windows in a window" VM, a backup of the passthrough VM from before the passthrough was added.

 

This guys video is for doing GPU passthrough with a single GPU, so it covers all the angles.

 

[Guest]

15 hours ago, seym56 said:

Some games like Star Citizen or other programs like Blue Stacks won't run on Linux.

If it's due to AntiCheat do be aware that it may consider using a VM to be a bannable offense.
As far as Blue Stacks have you considered trying Waydroid as an alternative? This is also helpful for getting it going, https://github.com/casualsnek/waydroid_script

 

and as already stated you typically want a second GPU you can passthrough to the VM if you want to do any sort of Graphically demanding tasks, in which case I would look at KVM+Libvirt along with looking-glass. If this isn't a option then VMware Workstation is the next best option, I wouldn't even bother with Virtualbox.

 

[Ralphred]

4 hours ago, Nayr438 said:

VMware Workstation

I used to use this a lot, the whole vmware suite, but haven't since libvirt became ubiquitous. Now, I **very carefully** consider libvirt to be better, but I'm not sure if "the hardware I'm using" is just better and VMWare Workstation would perform similarly as well nowadays...

[Guest]

12 hours ago, Ralphred said:

I used to use this a lot, the whole vmware suite, but haven't since libvirt became ubiquitous. Now, I **very carefully** consider libvirt to be better, but I'm not sure if "the hardware I'm using" is just better and VMWare Workstation would perform similarly as well nowadays...

Depends on what your doing, for Windows Desktop Virtualization on Linux KVM (libvirt) has no 3D acceleration unless you passthrough a GPU, Virtualbox has 3D acceleration but it's so poorly implemented I can't recommend it, and VMware Workstation on the other hand works pretty well when you don't have anything super demanding.

[annaheim]

use qemu