I use a Windows and Arch dualboot, but I’m looking to escape Microsoft. I’ve heard good things about both Fedora and Pop!_OS. I’m your average Arch user; I play video games and code. Are Windows VMs suitable for games like Call of Duty on such distros ?
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I’ve been running Pop since 2018 (I think?) and have had few issues. It currently pinned to the LTS of Ubuntu while they focus on their home grown Cosmic DE. They still update Kernel/Mesa versions though. Having never really “distro hopped” I put Fedora on a couple of machines when upgrading a couple months ago. I 90% can’t tell the difference. The new Gnome stuff is nice, and Wayland by default is nice. I’d say it’s hard to go wrong with either. Though Arch is more of an “enthusiast” Linux in my mind. Like something you’d have strong opinions about. Any particular reason to move away from it?
To second what others have said: VM’s aren’t suitable for gaming regrettably.
PopOS is a rather reliable distro, and I personally have loved the window tiling features they added, but it should be noted that they only have LTS from a year ago at the moment. I think that’s just while they work on their new desktop environment, but the older packages might be a tad bit of a transition coming from Arch.
I’m looking to escape Microsoft … Windows VM … Call of Duty
You’re not escaping Microsoft when putting Microsoft Windows in a VM and you’re not escaping Microsoft either when playing a game series that will be owned by Microsoft within the next few months.
Fair enough lol
I’ve tried every major distro and settled on Arch to receive the latest updates as soon as they exist. Its been pretty solid. But if I had to choose another distro I would choose Fedora, BUT… Red Hat has been a complete asshole, and I’m not supporting their shit.
If you don’t mind the Red Hat shit, Fedora.
Why not stay with Arch? Fedora has an uncertain Future due to RedHat. Anything else is probably fine, but it depends on what you want to achieve.
Regarding VM gaming it is working fine for the most part, but there are a few anti cheat engines which block VMs so your milage will vary (Escape from Tarkov, Rainbow Six Siege and I think Valorant don’t work, most other games do last time I checked). Keep in mind you need a mainboard which plays nice with IOMMU, a CPU with enough cores and you probably want two graphics cards. One dedicated for passthrough. If you don’t have a purpose built computer for this your results might not be great.
Playing Windows games in a Windows VM is not escaping Microsoft though, but others already said that.
I concure, i had pop os with virtual machines for windows via kvm/qemu. Total noob but i got it to work somehow. Anyway several games i couldnt play due to anti cheat, i had destiny 2 on my steam account that i cant play do to this problem as i risk my account being banned just for having linux. Eventually after some tinkering i broke my pop os(wanted to use lightdm and lighter desktop enviornment to save ram/cpu).
Only use windows vm for non linux friendly titles i have already paid for. Everything else will be via linux vm for gaming. Since vm is my goto i like keeping my host computer minimum. Also i prefer hdmi audio for my vms as my switch box has an toslink(fiber optic) audio out. Keeps the audio part super easy to add using astros or equivilant gear that have optical support.
I’ve been happily running Fedora Workstation for about 2 years on several devices and desktop environments. Up until the RedHat controversy, I would recommend Fedora. But you should probably try Pop!_OS first. It seems to be easier to use and Ubuntu compatible.
I recently moved from win 10 to Pop os for work related stuff, also I have arch on another ,free time pc, and Mint on my old home server-ish pc.
Pop is pretty good, all necessary stuff is preinstalled, I like how it works out of the box. Games run smoothly, not as smooth as on win but I can give up 5 fps for not being MS(lave)
Mint has more preinstalled packages, feels more bulky but runs ,smoother, on old laptop. Also the ui is more like windows
PopOS. They put ALOT of work into drivers for GPU’s whereas Fedora don’t. Also, Fedora is Red Hat so don’t use them. They are evil.
Better to be Ubuntu based like PopOS
Canonical isn’t exactly clean from controversy, and Ubuntu is a rather opinionated distribution. I appreciate how RedHat contributes upstream as much as possible, and how vanilla Fedora is. In my opinion, that makes for a better user experience.
Have you considered Mint? I tried PopOS but found the support wasn’t great. Mint is also based on Ubuntu but adds extra functionality and skips some of the dumb stuff Canonical is pushing (i.e. snaps for everything).
As far as games: VM’s are not really a good bet unless maybe you’ve got multiple video chips and are willing to invest time in getting GPU passthrough working (and then you really haven’t escaped Microsoft so why not just dual-boot).
I’ve found that games on Linux (particularly Steam games) with Proton are pretty damn good and only getting better over time. Valve has put a lot of work into that with the Steam Deck (which also runs on Linux) and the non-valve versions also sometimes cover stuff that can’t (like certain copy protections).
Your can see the rating for games on Linux with Proton here
Just reaffirming that my experience getting Activision/Blizzard stuff working on Linux has been mixed. I played older games that weren’t that GPU demanding, Hearthstone & Starcraft II, but the launcher would break pretty much every other update.
Mint is a great & everything works pretty much out of the box.
My understanding is that Fedora works pretty well for people gaming, GloriousEggroll, the guy that puts out the GE proton patches, contributes to Fedora, I think. Though you might want to check out NobaraLinux it is based on Feodra, but ships with additional goodies for gamers: Nvidia driver support, kernel patches, Discord, etc. https://nobaraproject.org/
Anything that you launch through Steam should also work, irrespective of your OS.
You can do VM’s with a single gpu these days, no need for 2
You can, but can you do accelerated graphics within the VM environment?
My last foray into this with KVM/Qemu (the system native to Linux) was that accelerated graphics virtualization was still pretty twitchy, requiring various protocols which were still a bit immature (libvf, looking glass) or only available on a subset of hardware (vGPU,SR-IOV)
The docs on single GPU passthrough indicate one must detach from the host and assign to the guest (and rely on SSH or remote-screen apps etc to control the host).
PCI passthrough is the best option I’ve heard but basically involved the Linux host using the lower-powered GPU (possibly an integrated graphics chip) and then the guest given passthrough access to the gaming card.
If you’ve got good documentation on how to do this less painfully, I’d love to give it another shot. I’m pretty happy with the Proton performance on most stuff but there’s definitely a few games that I’d love to move to a virtual system if it performs well
Using KVM, you can use do full GPU pass through to any OS from your host without a need for a second GPU (including integrated graphics).
Works with AMD and nvidia cards, I’ve even done this with a macOS VM.
Here’s a guide that’s the easiest I’ve found to follow. It includes some automated scripts.
https://github.com/BigAnteater/KVM-GPU-Passthrough - this guide is for Arch Linux, but the scripts and configs should work the same on any OS, you’ll just need to make sure the correct packages are installed.
Like you mentioned, there are some hardware requirements to do this, but most modern hardware supports it. Also, if you are running the VM then using SSH to control your host is probably your only option, but shutting down your VM should take you back to your display manager so there’s no rebooting.
I used this set up to play warzone for a while, performance was just as good as windows on bare metal.
Some notes from my experience:
- if you upgrade your host’s kernel, then reboot before trying to start your VM.
2 There are 2 scripts that will be built for you, vfio-startup and vfio-teardown. They will unload and reload kernel modules as needed so you’ll want to check if they are needed. My nvidia drivers are built into the kernel, so I couldn’t unload them, which stalled the VM startup.
- It might take some trial and error, if your VM doesn’t start after you attach the GPU then check the logs under /var/log/libvirt (or wherever your libvirt logs to)
I would say pop due to fedora getting caught up in the all drama surrounding red har right now
Why not stay on arch? I doubt the experience with VMS will differ between distros, just try it out. And as others have mentioned if your concern is anti cheat than vms might not work since some anti cheats can detect them. If it is not anti cheat than any distro will do, since pretty much anything not anti cheat is playable through proton these days. Another thing to consider is your GPU, keep in mind that if you want to use it for gaming in a VM you need to make a passthrough and you won’t be able to use it for your Linux desktop (I think at least, there might be a way to unload the GPU at runtime, but it’s probably complicated)
