I’ve been dual booting Linux and windows for about two years now, but in those two years, I have never booted into windows, except by mistake.
This made me think about removing windows and just saving that wasted space for Linux. I only ever dual booted for the off chance the peer pressure to play anti cheat games was too great, but so far it hasn’t.
For the off chance where I want to play a game that doesn’t run well on Linux, is it a good idea to do that via VM instead of dual boot, or is it too much hassle? Will there be performance hit or any issues with those games?
It works great if you’re willing to put in the effort of setting everything up the right way and don’t care about the tiny performance impact and the lack of direct storage support. From what I can tell, the performance impact is in the low single-digit percentage range with modern hardware (VT-x + VT-d + IOMMU or the AMD equivalent). It’s hard to say if this is too much of a hassle, that really depends on how much experience you have.
There are some in depth tutorials available that will guide you through the setup step-by-step, but they involve a lot of config files that you may or may not need to alter to suit your setup.
Ease of use is increased a lot if your monitor(s) can be attached to a different GPU than the one you’re trying to pass through, for example if you’ve got an iGPU built into your processor.
If you’re passing through your only GPU, you will probably need to do some pretty weird shit to safely detach the GPU, reattach it to the VM, and then hope that nothing broke in the mean time because you have no way of knowing what’s going on. I recommend enabling SSH and getting an SSH client set up on your device before you go this path.
Be aware, though: some anticheat software considers VMs to be forbidden or even ban-worthy. You can try to start an arms race against this software but ultimately their millions of dollars will overcome your drive to play that one specific game.
I’m in the same place regarding Windows, only booting Windows to play some games from my hard drive (lol remember hard drives) but I don’t think I’ve booted that partition this year. With Valve’s work on Proton and Lutris for the non-steam games, I just don’t play that many incompatible games anymore. I’ve messed with passthrough VMs (specifically, Hackintosh through libvirt) and I found them not too hard to set up.