Guide for VM without passthrough?

Software & Operating Systems
#1

HI all, I’ve been searching the forums a bit lately for a guide that doesn’t involve VGA passthrough. I have a few apps that fail on Wine mostly because there isn’t a good install for them, and I want to get them up and running on arch. I have an existing windows install that I would prefer to use, but I would rather not buy a second graphics card for vga passthrough. I know you can swap them back and forth, but that seems like being unnecessarily difficult for no reason. I’d rather run as many apps as possible native in linux. Anyhow, are there any good guides for something like QEMU? Can I do that without a passthrough?

#2

if you don’t need passthrough, you can just download virtualbox and do it in a couple clicks.

for qemu, just ingore all the driver and modprobe stuff, don’t remove spice or qxl screen or whatever it comes with by default, install the pv drivers and call it a day (use virt-manager to make this almost as simple as vbox)

the reason that there aren’t guides for basic VM setup is that it’s actually really user friendly these days.

#3

ah ok. That makes sense. I am worried about using virtual box because one game blocks it at the moment from my understanding.

#4

to my knowledge there’s no anti-cheat for stuff like photoshop

if you want to game and the game needs 3d, you probably want wine or a VGA passthrough VM

if it’s an app that doesn’t need a gpu both virt manager and vbox will be super easy to set up

also: if you don’t want to fiddle with this at all and hate switching your drives in uefi to dual boot, check out refind. makes dual booting a lot more user-friendly

#5

been years since I used refind. I might end up doing that now since i’m currently dual booting anyhow.

#6

now that VFIO is trendy people always try to talk people out of it, but if it aint broke…

#7

It may be trendy, but it sure seems like a PITA and a pain in the wallet.

#8

it’s actually really nice once you get it working, and it doesn’t need to be hard for a basic setup. People like to extend that with a bunch of software hacks and optimizations because it’s that kind of person who does it in the first place.