New to Linux. New to Vm's. Vaguely Scared. Wall of Text warning

Hey there LEVEL1!

There is a Linux based reason for my posting, but I like to give some background context first just in case. If you don't care, scroll down pass the gray line. If you REALLY don't care there is a TL;DR at the end.

So in the entirety of this year, I've been teaching myself all things computers. My profession that I endeavor towards is Real-time VFX. Particle simulations FTW! Since this profession lives on a computer, I felt it would be a good idea to learn the ins & outs of computers. Starting out I didn't even know what an ATX mobo or NVME SSD really was. Linus Tech Tips was actually very helpful for me in this regard. I was just a consumer, as long as it works - why should I care? That said, I may be laying on the "novice PC user" thing a little thick. I know my way around a windows system. Nothing crazy advanced, just enough so that in the event of a problem I know where to look. I don't freeze in place.
I'm typing this on a 9 year old laptop running vista, which in retrospect as been great! I had no M$ bullshit trying to turn my OS into Windows 10! YEA! That Windows 10 thing is important, so we'll be coming back to that. 'cus Linux. So in my learning I've built my imaginary PC, that deep down I've wanted to turn into reality. Here is the X99 PCPartBuilder Link! It's a state-of-the-art pricy sucker, as I don't know when I'll be doing it again. Best part is it looks like I may be able to turn it into reality. Which brings us to the OS. I've been rather leery of Windows 10 for quite some time now, the reports and news articles I've read have not helped things. For a time I was going to use Windows 10, if abit heavily neutered thanks to registry tweaks, ip firewalls and use of a program called Faronics Deep Freeze. Then I saw this Barnacules vid and I realized my theoretical neutering wouldn't be enough. Thus, from that point I started looking into Linux and Virtual machines. "Well played Microsoft. Well played. /S "


I've never used Linux before. I've never used a Virtual machine before. I'm learning alot and endeavor to keep doing such so that when everything comes together it all just works. In all the research I've done one thing has become very clear to me. When it comes to planning a system, be it hardware or software, the thing that kills most plans is missing some nature of compatibility and/or performance. That is why I'm posting here, as I hope extra eyes can help make sure I didn't miss something in my ignorance.

What I want to do is seems to be very much like what Wendell has done here, which I would love to see him update on. The difference being I'm using an X99 set up, which you can see by clicking this other X99 PCPartBuilder link. Furthermore, my distro of choice based on all the research I have done is to be Hardened Gentoo with a KDE desktop. Yes I know Gentoo is by far the hardest one to set up, which is exactly why in part I'm going for it. With it I want to be able to use KVM or any other type one bare metal hypervisor to run windows 10 so that I can run Unreal 4, Photoshop CS6, & 3ds Max 2016 all of which with plug ins, and Ideally do so with little to insignificant performance dips. I also hope to use something called Side FX Houdini which actually does work on some Linux distros, through in its list of compatibility Gentoo is not listed.

Honestly that's it. I just dumped all this here because... I don't know what to do. I don't know how to check that everything is going to work - at least in theory. I have a plan, but I don't know how to make sure my diabolical Oceans 11 scheme will work. I'm abit overwhelmed at the moment in trying to make sure that all the hardware will work with the OS and VMS. Worst of all I can't test any of this. All I have to make sure everything works are the available specs, and theory.

I leave my post at the forums mercy. (Heroes never die!)

TL;DR: Epic Noob. New hardware. Gentoo. KVM. Professional Windows applications. Double checking overall compatibility. Overwhelmed & Clueless. Can't test - All or nothing. Require experience of others. to add cadence to theory. Heroes never die!

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You do realize you are trying to instantly go from 0 to 100 here basically. Of course you are overwhelmed. I admire your enthusiasm but you should probably take a step back. Even you distro of choice will require some getting used to before you do anything (maybe you might want to consider sth wht a more out-of-the-box features for starting out). First find out about the hardware you want. Easy just google and ask on the gentoo specific sources (wiki, forums, reddit groups). Then use the documentation to install it. You might want to try it out on a virtualbox VM first before installing it on a native system, just for practice. After you have installed it and set it up and you feel comfortable with then you can think about more advance stuff like KVM passthrough etc. Do not try to get there on one step.

Oh and you should test your distro choice on your hardware before you even try to install it.You can boot from a live usb to test it before you install it on the system.

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You'll probably want to nab a beefy-ish AMD card for pass through.

Also personally I'd avoid Gentoo, and I say this as someone who spent ~4 years on it and generally enjoyed my time. Gentoo isn't particularly difficult to setup. It's tedious. The thing is there are plenty of compiler message to scroll by, so you feel like you're doing something. You're not actually doing anything except introducing instability because someone told you that cflags -O4 optimizes something, or some other such nonsense.

You're new to Linux, and you want to dive in and learn. That's super awesome! But as much as I love Linux, and as much as it just generally works for me, there is something to using it. Not all FOSS applications are created equally. You will run into applications that aren't stable. Maybe even some to the point where you wonder if core components of the OS itself are unstable. You don't need your own inexperience adding confusion to your learning process. Start with stability. Grab yourself the latest Debian ISO, and future you will thank past you.

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Yeah don't jump to gentoo straight away, I had used linux for about 10 years and still thought it's waaay too cumbersome.
Fedora, OpenSuse, Ubuntu or Manjaro would be my suggestions.
The distro doesn't matter really, once you know your way around linux you can do whatever with whichever distro.

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Strange thread though: you want help on a full Gentoo config to run Windows... that's like asking Jesus to build a home for the devil. It's strange.

There is absolutely no way a hardened Gentoo host will offer you any benefit whatsoever for a desktop Windows guest. Hardening is for servers. There is no benefit to either using Gentoo or using a hardened kernel or extensive MAC/RBAC tightening beyond the standard security level of common desktop distros. Gentoo will offer you no performance benefit over other distros in that particular application, it will however prolong your offline-time because the updates will take much longer, unless of course you use binary packages with entropy (which should not be mixed with source packages through portage or the system might get really unstable very fast), in which case you could go for an RPM distro that uses DeltaRPM and encrypted package transfers for enhanced safety and less offline-time.

If you're going to mainly use the WIndows guest anyway, there is no use in installing KDE either, it will just bog the system down to have any graphical desktop environment in the host, and you don't need it there because you're going to just use Windows anyway.

Windows running in a kvm container for gaming is something that can be relatively easily configured safely, as long as "features" like XBox crap or nVidia driver spyware aren't necessary. For commercial consumer software like Adobe CC though, it's not that easy. PS CS6 will probably be kind of alrightish to run, but Adobe CC requires a very lenient nftables config for the network bridge, to a point where it's unrealistic to secure your Windows guest. Windows 10 gets more evil with every update also, a secure nftables config WILL lead to breakage, there is no doubt about that, and because of that, you will be faced with a situation in which you will have to use an un-updated Win10 install that is cut from the internet and snapshotted, and all your work stored in a linux filesystem volume outside of the container. All of that is far from practical for work.

I get kvm passthroughs for gaming, but for professional use, it's very very annoying and leads to a situation whereby you have to implement so much workarounds, that you'll forget some at some point and might even lose work because of the consequences that entails.

Maybe you can move towards open source applications and really boost your workflow and efficiency and safety, without any Windows anywhere. Going forward, that is the real and only long term viable solution.

Ok, your enthusiasm is great.

First, if you are trying to do a passthrough set up you will need a GPU for your host Linux system in addition to the one you want. X99 CPUs do not have on chip iGPUs so it will have to be a separate card.

Second, I am not entirely sure how long your simulations take to run. But if it is for any length of time you may want the GPU with ECC memory like a Quadro or Firepro. Does the software you use primarily use CUDA or OpenCL acceleration that will determine which card you want. That Titan has kinda crummy double precision performance for the price. A work station card would serve you better.

Third, the X sku CPU you want is overpriced for the performance gained. A dual CPU (Xeon) build may be actually cheaper and net you more cores.

Fourth, Gentoo will eat up time due to compiles. You may want a distro with more quality of life features like Fedora, Opensuse or a flavor of Debian. You are also more likely to get support for Houdini.

Unreal 4 and Houdini both run in Linux so depending on how married you are Photoshop you may not even need a Windows 10 VM. And if you only need it for Photoshop it would mean far less resources would be needed for the VM. 3DMax is what makes your build tricky.

But, you could save some effort and simply dual boot for Photoshop and 3DMax. And run the rest of the software in Linux.

If not, VFIO Blog is a great site to learn about KVM GPU passthrough. Arch Wiki and Suse documentation has a ton of good info that will work for any distro.

Let us know what comes next because your project sounds very cool. And your enthusiasm is infectious!

Thank you all. I have to say I'm impressed already, as you lot seem to be far more cordial then some other communities where I've expressed similar-ish concerns. So I'll let ya'll in on a little secret. What could possibly go wrong. :P

I'm chasing a dream ya'll. I already have a majority of the knowhow, I just need to show off what I know. This project of mine doesn't just have the possibility for building, learning, and knowing how to make a kickass PC, with a kickass OS. It has the possibility to get me my Dream Job if I can pull the right cards with it. Then I'd be using it for my job. Enthusiasm just doesn't even begin to cover it. I'm literately making and seizing my opportunity.

I do realize I'm going from 0 to 100. Yet I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't feel like I could manage it which may seem odd on your end. My dilemma is data. If I could have found some magical list of compatibility, protocol and relationships I wouldn't have needed to make this post. Measure twice cut once.

So instead of quoting everyone and responding to each line, which I generally would do, I'm going give more information and my overall thoughts due to over lapping observations.


Hardware

Why the obviously overly expensive Broadwell E 10 core? Why the Titan X Pascal?

Alright...geez. If you think this project I'm on right now in finding the right Distro and VM Windows mix is fun, let me tell ya, my search in figuring out the hardware was just as fun. Some of the reasons are actually mentioned in my original post. Again - Linus helped a bunch here. My needs are unique as I basically need all the things but don't really have alot of cash. Might not look that way in PCPartpicker, but.. yeah. Simply trust that much fun was had making variant after variant after variant. Then I would check again. Weigh the pros with the cons, till we get to what I linked to in the original post. Speaking of weight, what had the most importance? Well, the main bulk of what I do is real time, or aimed towards real time. Hence Unreal 4. Hence a beefy video card that ISN'T a Quadro. Yet, in some of the things I do will require rendering. This is so that I can do some artsy magic to make rendered magic happen in a real time. In essence what I was trying to figure out was how to make a Gaming Workstation. It needs to be able to do all the things well. Yet realtime is key.

Why the Broadwell E? The core speeds and the abilities of turbo boost 3.0. That isn't all, but the next reason segways nicely into the GPU. Don't get me wrong through, it is a heavy premium. Yet whatever is finally chosen, will be what I use in till failure or total obsolescence. I'll make sure I get my money's worth with time. Anywho, what is the difference between a Quradro & Geforce? The Price ? Yes. That isn't the only difference, with drivers, and market focus but honestly. The price. Geez. Since most of my work relies more on the realtime then the rendering anyway (which is where drivers come in), I felt that the one Pascal Titan X was the way to go. Why one? Well, here is a fun fact! Autodesk programs have not been programmed, apparently, to be able to use GPU in SLI. So if you have two GPUs the program will only see one of them. My jaw dropped when I came across that tidbit. It's honestly too stupid to believe, but in my search to verify, it seems indeed to be the case. Likewise Adobe has not made it so that their applications like Photoshop or Premiere take advantage of any extra cores as most processes are best with single threads. In most benchmarks I've seen Adobes stuff has worked better on a Skylake i7-6700K (which I was considering at one time). Thus - the Broadwell E. While it won't be a good as the Skylake, the Turboboost 3.0 function will help give a better of both worlds. Otherwise yea - Xeon & Quadro FTW.

All that said through, when I was building this Windows 10 was the bare metal OS I was going to boot to. Heh. Tooo boot to. Such has changed. Now not only do I need to run CPU and GPU intensive programs, in some cases I need to do it over a VM! Which changes things. I'm hopeful that a type one hypervisor such as what KVM can do that it can give me the clearance I need, but, really. Since I have never even used a VM before, I don't even know where to start. That doesn't even bring Linux into the fold, that's a whole another thing entirely. So yeah. I sure know how to make things interesting. Then again, that is what I'm trying to get paid to do, more or less. sigh

I'm just smart enough to know how dumb I am. You can quote me on that.

All that said, is there anything AMD can do that Intel or Nvidia can't do?


OS & Programs

So why not just dual boot? Windows 10. The only reason why I'm even beholden to windows are the programs I HAVE to use. As long as I can run the programs, windows doesn't mean shit. Or does it? It's getting so hard to tell these days. If I'm running windows 10 bare metal then I'm running into the very problems that brought me to conclude I should use Linux in the first place. At least in a VM I can sandbox windows. I think.

So then why Gentoo? Alright. So this is far more recent, as recent as about a week after the Barnacules video I've linked in my original post above. The reason I liked Gentoo, based on what I read, was its ability to be customized, and its potential to be CRAZY efficient. At least on paper. Creating the kernel from scratch, from my reading, seems to be like creating a cast mold OS to the hardware it's self. You literally install ONLY what you need. At the very least that SOUNDS really good. And since I don't know any better, NOW is the best time to run the hardest thing as I have no idea how easy it can really be. AND! AND! I'll learn a lot in the process. At the very least - that SOUNDS good. Add that to what I need to do with the VM, and... hopefully you can see the logic. That said, some of you have given me a reason to check again, so I shall. I shall double check for stability.

It's also true a hardened Distro would be best for servers, but I honestly don't like the direction we are headed digitally. Shit in 2007 I was leery about the potential security downfalls of smartphones & facebook. I can't seem to decide if we, in the digital realm, are moving towards and are in 1984 or a Brave New World. Honestly its probably both if at all, simply because we can. Regardless if we should. Don't get me wrong I'm not putting any tinfoil over my windows...well. I guess I am digitally. :P (HA!)

I digress through, as my biggest concern at this point is ransomware and theft. I know (I know?) that Linux is far more secure by default then Windows & Mac, but if I can throw in an extra layer of encryption or sandboxing or whatever - why not? Especially since this computer may very well act as my source for living in society. My bread an' butter. I don't know that, but it's a possibility to be considered.

I mean shit... I'm doin' all this anyway.

As for KDE, As analytical as I may be, I like pretty things. Wendell likes candy. I like design. KDE may be as bloated as a dead whale, but I don't care. Does that make any sense after what I talk about with Gentoo? NOPE! Do I care? I'm sorry I can't hear you over how delicious this candy is. OM NOM NOM. Also I need a bitchin file manager.

In the end it's all about the VM Tech. I don't really have much to say here because, for the moment, it's what I'm the most clueless about. All I know is that there are performance costs, not even factoring in whatever I'm doing in Linux. My hope is to find some way to make the potential performance drop less than 3%, but I don't know if that is even feasible. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe I'll find something no one else did because its "impossible". YEAH! Or I'm fucked but don't realize it yet. YEAH!....oh..wait. Oh. :P

I'll look up the VFIO Blog.

I have to use Photoshop. I have to use Autodesk programs. Not only because they are the industry standard, meaning entrenched, but I also have plug ins that only work in those programs. Some of which will be proprietary. It's "bad" enough I'm trying desperately to break free of windows at home. Yet for the programs that are my bread and butter, I'm shackled to them. Through if any of you have the power to change what an industry at large uses every day, I would love to see it. Having said that, sorry ya'll. I don't see Gimp or Blender going mainstream in the uber big leagues any time soon. Thus, why I go to such lengths. Also - let's not forget about Unreal 4, as that is what everything is going in to.

With all that said, I'm going to throw one more thing at ya'll, because I don't understand the idea of "limits". :P
Something I came across that I find interesting, but don't understand. It's rather dated at 4 years old, but basically this guy hated having to boot up a VM window every time he wanted to use a windows program, so he does something with:

1) a single KVM VM running Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise,

2) Microsoft's RemoteApp protocol and RemoteApp Publishing

3) FreeRDP - a Linux cmd line tool that supports RemoteApp & RemoteFX protocols

4) WinConn - a GUI front-end to FreeRDP
... to make it as if he was in windows, but in linux. This it totally something I'm intrigued by as window real estate is a big deal for me. I know, I need to make sure what I have actually WORKS first. Yes I know. Still cool. Still something I'm interested in possibly replicating what I get to that point. So. Here it is.


And it's as simple as that! Oh. Is that all? :P

I can't seem to recall what clip, but somewhere Wendell mentioned that the day Linux gets seamless windows and mac "emulation" (I forget the word used) , is the day Linux truly takes over the world. I agree.

WHEW! I hope that's everything. Geez. Heh.

TL;DR - Fuck it. This guy crazy. Run while you still can!! AAAAHH! IT GOT M-!! Odd gargling noises