I’m building a new PC. I was lucky and got my hands on RTX3080 and Ryzen 5800X. I have some specific questions buried in the text below, I will bullet them right here:
- Why not keep dual booting?
- Enter windows on a VM, maybe?
- How should I setup a tiered storage for a game library?
- do ssds wear evenly underneath their logical physical partition boundaries?
- is it [windows vm] going to be good enough to play the latest games?
I want to play windows games, but I can’t stand windows 10. So most of what I do on a computer, I do in linux, the last important thing I haven’t sorted is cryptigraphic signing of PDFs in linux. I suppose I could have two computers, and in fact I have lots of computers. But I want to do the work on the new gear, just like I want play the games on the new gear. I have been running dual boots with windows and linux since the dawn of time (c.f. slackware 7 release). And why let that tasty gear run windows telemetry 24/7 when it could be doing what I want it to, maybe something productive?
Why not keep dual booting? I see lots of posts about windows in VM here, that’s exciting! Bare-metal windows wants it’s own partition(s). To hit the easy-button, I could give windows a boot ssd and two more drives (ssd + hdd) for a tiered-storage game library. But then I need drives for linux, typically ssd for / and hdd for /home.
That’s 5 flippin’ drives! I could split ssds so that each os has it’s own parition for boot and take some of hdd for each, potentially using only 2 drives. How should I setup a tiered storage for a game library? I would really like to use LVM to manage all this stuff, but I doubt you can run windows on an LVM logical drive. But I worry about uneven drive wear, do ssds wear evenly underneath their logical physical partition boundaries? Last I was up-to-date on it (before the advent of ssds), hdds keep their partition writes within the physical boundaries which define that partition.
Enter windows on a VM, maybe? Without any experience I presume it’s fine to create a windows virtual disk on a linux tiered storage system. This is appealing for simplicity of the build, I can also more-or-less dynamically resize the partition and the virtual disk on a whim. As well as add or remove physical drives with LVM. I like this idea alot!
But what’s this I’m seeing about problems with GPU passthrough on Ryzen platforms? Is this really broken? Also if I do try cyberpunk2077, will performance totally suck (even more than on bare-metal)?
Bottom line: There’s alot of info on the windows VM around here. I haven’t taken alot of time to absorb it yet, but I will. and I will be appreciative of anyone pointing me in a particularly good direction to start reading up on the windows vm in linux topic? Also (Maybe more importantly,) is it going to be good enough to play the latest games?
I should also start a seperate thread on the build, to give you guys some context on the hardware I have now, and what storage I still need to get.
P.S. I can’t imagine anyone needs to read about why I hate windows 10, but if you do, let me know and I can write more on that subject.