Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by tmikaeld | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

tmikaeld

"...why not switch to OS X or Linux"

One word: Games.

View on HN

A problem which Valve is currently solving.

WINE has been solving it much longer ;)

If by "solving" you mean "adding even more problems". It's a crutch at best and a nightmare at worst. Why would you ever prefer WinE over a native version?

>It's a crutch at best

And sometimes it is a crutch that Microsoft doesn't provide. I recall Windows Vista causing some pain for old games - such as requiring the Screen/Resolution window open otherwise Starcraft would run with corrupt colours. Wine isn't perfect, and I expect it never will be. But short of a full virtualised Windows XP, it is one of the best ways to run those old games that aren't getting treatment from the likes of GOG.

WINE is an amazing piece of software, one of the most impressive out there. I prefer it because it lets me do what I need to do without disrupting everything else I have going on. I do usually have to use a VM since the programs I need most struggle on WINE, but to the extent that I can run something in WINE, I really appreciate it. It's definitely better than having to lose 10GB+ of RAM and 100GB+ of disk to a VM. With games, a VM is usually not an option due to the need to virtualize video hardware; WINE allowed me to play Source-engine games in Linux for hundreds of hours over the years before native ports came out. I wish they would get DX11 support out some day so I can play recent games, though.

WINE can make a lot of really cool stuff happen. I suggest you take another look.

Disclaimer: I contributed a patchset to WINE 4 years ago.

They're solving it for the future, sure. According to SteamDB I currently have 269 products in my Steam account of which only 78 are compatible with Linux; I doubt the majority of the rest will ever be ported to run on SteamOS/Linux.

Also, not every developer/publisher has - or is willing to commit - the resources to release their games on Linux/SteamOS. It's difficult enough to release a game for Windows that runs reliably on the multitude of hardware configurations out there. Duplicating that effort to release on another OS is a massive undertaking for some.

Lots of words: Countless niche, industry or company specific, but incredibly important, pieces of software most people have probably never heard of.

Dual boot?

I dual boot for games. In practice, I start Windows like twice a year. If the game isn't native and doesn't run in WINE, it simply never gets played. Just have too much stuff going on in main OS to stop it all for a few hours while I reboot and play.

How about sleeping instead of straight rebooting, and then booting to windows, so that when you restart and boot back into Linux you have everything the same way? If you have an SSD it's pretty fast to reboot to a different OS.

That's possible, but the problem isn't so much in my session being lost as it is in my services and processes not running anymore. I host a Plex server on my machine that serves the whole family, I rely on it for remote SSH if I need to get into the network from the road, I share files to clients from it, and so forth.

Really it's too important to take down very often. I've considered buying a separate box for Windows. I run Windows applications in either WINE or VirtualBox, but with games that don't support WINE, that doesn't work unless you have specific, hard-to-find hardware and an extra GPU. Since games are the only thing I'm missing out on, more and more games are getting Linux native versions, and I don't have much time for games anyway, I haven't actually pulled the trigger on the separate Windows machine yet, but one day I will.

I never (all right, not never, but at least in the last five years) understood dualboot. Why not just run one OS as a master and then a VM in it?

Hardware access and performance. It is only recently that the performance got OK-ish (through probably it is still not, if you feel that you have to get i7 6700K) and virtualizations started supporting PCI-Passthrough.

The setup is still not simple, your common dual-booter will not be able to setup it right, yet.

> virtualizations started supporting PCI-Passthrough

To get a graphics card actually capable of this, you either need to buy the commercial grade versions (Quadro and FirePro) with are much more expensive, or buy a specific card for this purpose and deal with tons of issues[1] like not being able to restart the guest without crashing the host.

[1]: http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_VGA_Passthrough_Tested_A...

ATI consumer cards do support PCI-Passthrough, it's Nvidia that you need Quadro.

But the setup is not a simple one of neither.

the vga arbiter stuff went away with UEFI based cards (about 2 years ago), consumer level cards now work without issue.

NVIDIA attempt to detect the VM and artificially disable the driver, but works perfectly if you tell KVM to hide the fact it's a VM (requires a flag to be set in the config).

the technical difficulty of pci passthrough consists of clicking "add pci device", then selecting your graphics card from the list.

If privacy is crucial, it's better to run Linux hosts and Windows VMs. But that doesn't work so well for high-end graphics, whether games or CAD. Or when even the fastest CPUs are too slow.

So then you run Linux VMs in a Windows host. In my experience, VMware is a better choice on Windows hosts. But it's been a few years, and maybe VirtualBox is doing better on Windows.

That's why I mentioned PCI-Passthrough. Then the guest can directly drive the graphics card, with it's native drivers.

But you and johncolanduoni both say that it's nontrivial. However, blibble says that it's easy with current ATI consumer hardware.

I know a few gamers who would like to relegate Windows to a locked-down VM ;)

Well, it was a while that I was looking at it. Combine that with my opinions about gamers' hardware and system software knowledge (not very flattering, outside of knowing which brands and models are "best"), that's how I came to the conclusion, that it might be difficult for them.

But do not take that as discouragement, your friends definitely should try it on their own.

Dual boot works fine, as long as the windows machine is the host, and the linux machine is the guest, since only on the host will you get reasonable gaming performance.

EDIT: Yes meant to answer the "Why dual boot when you can use a VM". My post meant to say "VM is cool is Windows is the host". Sorry.

I think he meant dual booting as in installing two operating systems side by side, and running one at a time on bar metal - not virtualizing anything.

You're thinking of virtualization. Dual booting is when you have both OS installed on different partitions/drives and you restart to boot a different one.

Uhm? No. You seem to confuse dual boot with virtualization. Dual boot means 'Reboot, pick a different OS in the bootloader'. Both Linux AND Windows would run with full performance, but never at the same time. There is no concept of host or guest.

Hah sorry, I was answering the wrong post, I meant to answer the post that said "why dual boot when you can run a VM", and the answer should be "VM works fine as long as..."

Sorry about that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com