Hopefully some of this comes to Windows guests. One of the major issues right now is that Windows virtualisation isn’t great. VirtualBox has GPU problems, VMware requires a lot of messing about with kernel modules if you don’t use Ubuntu, if KVM/QEMU is able to make a smooth environment for Windows guests that’d help bring people in who still need Windows for the odd bit of software or two.
I remember there was a GPU driver for Windows but that seems to have stalled?
Edit: Cleared up why I think VMware is a bit of a mess.
virtio-sound likely will eventually and ufs probably will too. the gpu driver is being worked on by a third party, but it’s still using virgl so I doubt it will be very preformant
I’m talking about the installation process for VMware itself.
I had to help someone non-techy install VMware on Pop!_OS (the OS preinstalled by System76 on their hardware), and it required messing with the kernel modules which fails on Pop!_OS. It seems like VMware builds for a very specific version of Ubuntu which of course, means the kernel module building process fails when you use a kernel version that’s different to what Ubuntu has (which Pop!_OS does and maybe some other Ubuntu-based distros). Thankfully someone on GitHub maintains up-to-date patches for the VMware modules so I was able to guide him through there but this isn’t something someone new to Linux would want to do.
It’s not like simply installing it from a package manager, well unless you use Arch but I’m not putting this person who’s new to Linux on Arch when he just started using CLI.
If you need this frequently, I really suggest you look into GPU forwarding. I have a Windows VM setup with a second card and it works perfectly, I use it for games and CAD all the time. Figure out your iommu groups, pop a second card in your computer (and optionally a second nvme drive if you want max performance), and use virt-manager and the arch wiki to set it up.
For accessing the machine you can use a second monitor input, or you can get a window to the machine with looking glass or moonlight. I use moonlight as it lets me play games from my laptop on the couch, and looking glass was causing windows to crash sometimes.
It’s a bit of work to set it all up but when you’re done it should just be one XML file and maybe one modprobe.d config file.
I think I’ve been using this for over a year now and the single pain point I encountered in all that time was maybe that usb input hotplug isn’t supported, though there’s ways to fix that, but I haven’t bothered.
Hopefully some of this comes to Windows guests. One of the major issues right now is that Windows virtualisation isn’t great. VirtualBox has GPU problems, VMware requires a lot of messing about with kernel modules if you don’t use Ubuntu, if KVM/QEMU is able to make a smooth environment for Windows guests that’d help bring people in who still need Windows for the odd bit of software or two.
I remember there was a GPU driver for Windows but that seems to have stalled?
Edit: Cleared up why I think VMware is a bit of a mess.
virtio-sound likely will eventually and ufs probably will too. the gpu driver is being worked on by a third party, but it’s still using virgl so I doubt it will be very preformant
What are you going on about? VMware and Windows work just fine if you install vmware tools.
I’m talking about the installation process for VMware itself.
I had to help someone non-techy install VMware on Pop!_OS (the OS preinstalled by System76 on their hardware), and it required messing with the kernel modules which fails on Pop!_OS. It seems like VMware builds for a very specific version of Ubuntu which of course, means the kernel module building process fails when you use a kernel version that’s different to what Ubuntu has (which Pop!_OS does and maybe some other Ubuntu-based distros). Thankfully someone on GitHub maintains up-to-date patches for the VMware modules so I was able to guide him through there but this isn’t something someone new to Linux would want to do.
It’s not like simply installing it from a package manager, well unless you use Arch but I’m not putting this person who’s new to Linux on Arch when he just started using CLI.
If you need this frequently, I really suggest you look into GPU forwarding. I have a Windows VM setup with a second card and it works perfectly, I use it for games and CAD all the time. Figure out your iommu groups, pop a second card in your computer (and optionally a second nvme drive if you want max performance), and use virt-manager and the arch wiki to set it up.
For accessing the machine you can use a second monitor input, or you can get a window to the machine with looking glass or moonlight. I use moonlight as it lets me play games from my laptop on the couch, and looking glass was causing windows to crash sometimes.
It’s a bit of work to set it all up but when you’re done it should just be one XML file and maybe one modprobe.d config file.
I think I’ve been using this for over a year now and the single pain point I encountered in all that time was maybe that usb input hotplug isn’t supported, though there’s ways to fix that, but I haven’t bothered.
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