Have a ryzen 7 pc with 16gb ram and RX 560 4gb.(i think) Mostly interested in emulation, but won’t game much on this pc. I have a console and find it easier to use that instead.
Just don’t want to keep switching between OS, since I have a huge torrent collection. (private tracker) Going to be a pain when switching from Windows and Linux,then having to update torrents constantly.
I think I could do fine with a Windows VM, since I don’t do heavy gaming. Then just run word, excel, etc… Still not sure if whine will support some games though. Would I be able to run games under Linux, with a windows VM?
I’ve used Linux before on old Vaio(i7-2nd gen) laptops, but always had screen tearing because locked down bios. My pc should have less problem, considering the specs.
Also I have a 2 monitors, could I just output the VM to second screen? This would make things easier.
Mostly looking for advice for those who use Linux with Windows VM.
Lastly, please correct me if I’m wrong, but how would I use GPU pass through with my windows VM? Not too familiar with this.
Probably the best advice I would give is to minimise what you use Windows for so that you need it less and less.
What do you need Windows for? You mention Excel and Word. Do you need these for anything specific that you couldn’t do in Linux or the web version? If those are your only requirements you could probably just get rid of Windows with very little issue.
I’ll be honest if your games are dx9 or 10 they’ll run fine, and if newer, the wine devs are blasting skywards at an incredible speed right now dx11 will be within months. 12 will be tricky though. If your games have vulkan they’ll run amazingly well.
I know a lot of people say that windows in a vm to game is the future of linux or whatever but I think thats bullshit. If you want to use linux use your whole system for it. I’m a user of about 10 years now and really only have 3 games that I can’t play on linux (gta, h1z1, empyrion) that I have to get up and go to another machine and play. But like I said the wine devs are on a rocket. 2 or 3 months gtav will run fine in linux. Hell it almost runs now. Even overwatch works for some people and it probably will when gtav does.
As for your torrents… what? You do know we have utorrent and tixati and all that shit right?
dx9 y, dx10 not so much as from mine tests, going from dx9 to dx11 in same game gives you -50% performance for some reason as for now (tests on wine-stable 3.0.1 vs wine-gaming-nine 2.21 as i remember, gallium-nine makes performance even better than in native windows tho …)
1: Never use wine stable. Use staging.
2: When did you try this?
3: DX11 in wine isn’t a thing yet, really. It works, sure, renders, but it doesn’t stay that way at all. It’ll crash whenever it feels like.
Now if I play DX:HR or, uhhhhh what was the other game I play in DX10… Skyrim? Something. Point is it works fine. But you do need to define your libs before you install your games in winecfg and not a lot of people do that.
Oh wait your memory clock? An RX460 is a low enough chip that if the memory stays at a high clock you get better performance out of the card. On linux I think it just does that automatically for you but in windows it’ll try to save as much power as possible and render all the desktop graphics with the CPU. In linux though you can have marco or compiz as your render engine for your DE and they run on the GPU. AMDGPU sees that theres stuff asking for GPU, 460 clocks go up. My R7 250X did the same thing.
Some Nvidia cards do that too like the 1030 and 1040.
I’m constantly updating or adding torrents. If I dual boot, one OS will always have outdated files. Rather use one OS and not bother with updating torrents, when I use the other OS.
For me it was it having integrated card and dedicated card with a physical switch. I had no way to disable integrated card and Linux would only use the integrated card. Anyways, don’t own it anymore.
If you’re just using Windows for torrents, Word, and Excel, then I don’t understand why people are recommending GPU passthrough. Full screen Windows with Virtualbox or VMware Workstation have been fine for me for day to day tasks sharing GPU memory.
I 100% agree with this. (Somehow I always find myself agreeing with @Eden ) My usecase was similar to the OP, when I made the switch to Linux.
If you need Excel / Word /Office suite, I found that Libre Office does very well with that. Power Point not so much… But If you have a Hotmail/Outlook account you can use the web versions, or GApps.
I thought that dual boot would be just fine for this type of use case, but yes VMWare / VirtualBox or even Boxes ( Fedora distro ) would work just fine.
I don’t see how changing OS is affecting this? Torrents are hashed and resumed. Maybe creating a partition that is NTFS so that both Windows and Linux can utilize it, and have a common client like Deluge.
i know this is an old post but may i ask if you have managed to get empyrion working in linux? i am seriously thinking of moving to linux so i am researching if my games will run on linux. any help or advise would be greatly appreciated
Empyrion’s engine is enough of a buggy mess on its own, even if the devs got it working to the point that anything RENDERED in wine, that’d be great. Sadly they’re a bit shite at system integration yet, sowe’ll be waiting for a bit.
Can’t hurt to try tho. I’m one of few who can play dark souls in proton without crashes, so maybe it’ll just run for you. I couldn’t say otherwise if it’d work, as game compatibility is also loosely based on how proton works with your hardware. Test it out and see!