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Comment by esotericn | Hacker News Reader

I've been using GPU passthrough for Windows gaming on and off for a while now.

I think it's fundamentally a better solution. edit: (for desktops).

Why is it better than dual booting? Well, it's faster, and you can use whatever backing store you like (e.g. ZFS volumes for snapshots, LUKS encryption, ...), run services in the background, etc.

Why is it better than WINE? Far more compatible. Setting it up can be a hassle, but once you get it working it's (as far as I can tell) identical to a native boot. Better sandboxing (VM's aren't perfect and GPU passthrough likely introduces more holes, but that's better than running proprietary code on your main system).

That said, it's a power user thing and probably always will be. But then, isn't that the PC gaming market anyway?

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> Why is it better than dual booting? Well, it's faster, and you can use whatever backing store you like (e.g. ZFS volumes for snapshots, LUKS encryption, ...), run services in the background, etc.

Any way to avoid dual-booting is also good because if you do your work on Linux, you don't lose state. After a day of work, I sometimes want to play games, and I like it when I don't have to shut down my editor and the image of the program I am working on. In fact, having to reboot is a quite effective deterrent for me.

Hibernation?

Is quite wonky on Linux. Causes quite a bit of software to misbehave and in general instability after resume is an issue - at least in my experience over the last ten years.

Not really viable if you want services running in the background.

Passthrough allows me to have one beefy machine that does everything. It's just another VM.

That said, I game very rarely anyway, but sometimes you just want to blow things up, y'know?

Hibernation doesn't seem to be reliable on my Linux system, and on Windows it locks all NTFS drives into read-only mode, which interferes with my setup on Linux (I run Dropbox on Linux symlinked to the Dropbox folder on Windows drive, in order to not duplicate data on the Linux SSD).

This also requires a separate, dedicated GPU for the VM, which is a deal-breaker for many users.

I use a single GPU.

I do however have a secondary machine (laptop) to manage the VM from, though.

It's never going to work for everyone, sure, but most will just game on Windows anyway. I like to evangelize because I think it's really quite neat.

So you don't reboot, but do you stop X, right?

Yeah. I don't really "use" X, though. I don't lose any state other than browser tabs, which reload anyway (it's really just the same as switching from desktop to laptop, you want tab state synced anyway so it's a non issue I find).

Firefox and a terminal window (tmux or similar) is enough for my needs.

90% of the time (right now for example) my screen is 70% terminal and 30% browser.

I have a Linux VM for actual work that also gets GPU passthrough that I "restart" into (e.g. kill qemu1 windows, start qemu2 linux). It's sort of like dual boot except long running processes stay in the background.

You could basically think of it as the VM's being a thin client on to a server, except they're all on the same box.

The host is pretty much a hypervisor only.

I might do a write up of all of this at some point if you're interested. I kind of figure that most Linux users enjoy this sort of masochism. :)

Please do a write up. I've been interested in doing something like this, but it's hard to find appropriate resources to do it.

Here's a write up of a GPU passthrough solution involving two GPUs: https://medium.com/@dubistkomisch/gaming-on-arch-linux-and-w...

So you do reboot.

...your Linux VM.

which means that you can't run windows and your Linux desktop at the same time.

It's an improvement, but still a dealbreaker for me personally.

> I think it's fundamentally a better solution. edit: (for desktops).

Not really for Linux users who don't want to use Windows.

There are plenty of programs that simply don't and won't work on Linux. For the people who need any these, using a VM with passthrough is the best solution if you prefer using primarily Linux.

> There are plenty of programs that simply don't and won't work on Linux.

Ditching games that don't work is not a big deal, given that a huge amount works just fine. So avoiding Windows is preferable to running it in VM.

Programs. Not games. Re-read. Adobe, CAD, etc.

You don't need Proton or dxvk for that. Above was about gaming scenario.

Using Windows in a VM is a necessity and the best solution if you need such programs but still want to use primarily Linux. How are you not getting this? Games aren't the only reason to use Wine, but Wine also doesn't solve everything.

This is relevant because games aren't the only thing holding back people from switching to Linux. As long as there are programs that don't work on Linux and for the foreseeable future won't ever work, plenty of people won't switch.

See the original comment above by @esotericn:

    I've been using GPU passthrough for Windows gaming on and off for a while now.
    I think it's fundamentally a better solution. edit: (for desktops).

It's not about CAD and etc. I disagree with the idea of using Windows in VM as a better approach for Linux gaming than running games in Wine.

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