When I dual boot Linux and Windows, I like to have two separate drives and not ever mix up the bootloaders. I then use my motherboards boot selector to choose which one, and I leave the main OS as the first priority one.
Works perfectly, avoids Windows overwriting Linux and avoids GRUB breaking for the 11th time this month because it’s a terrible piece of software. The only downside is it takes 10 seconds longer, because whenever I want to change I need to wait for my motherboard to recognize the boot selection key.
I have never had grub break on OpenSUSE in 6+ years. But also i install OpenSUSE after Windows and with its own boot partition. it finds windows and adds a chainloader grub entry. Set OpenSUSE as default in bios. Windows never knows it is chainloaded and leaves your linux boot alone
to use as a media centre and multiplayer gaming system in my living room
Based on this, you’re basically looking for the ‘game console experience on your couch’. If that’s the case, honestly you shouldn’t look beyond^[1]^ Bazzite.
If, instead, you actually wanted to play retro games primarily, then please let us know.
While ChimeraOS and HoloISO also offer the ‘game console experience’, they don’t support Nvidia GPUs. So you would be on your own at best; which would be a horrible experience for a new user. If you feel particularly adventurous, then Jovian-NixOS is actually another option. But arguably less newbie-friendly compared to Bazzite.
I’d definitely like to get some of the classic multiplayer games running on emulators as well.
Bazzite does allow easy install of EmuDeck and RetroDECK during first installation, which should cover most of your emulation needs. For completeness’ sake; Batocera does exist. However, I’m not sure if it runs e.g. Steam games as good as Bazzite runs retro games.
Man, I want to dual boot, but I’m scared shitless. I don’t want windows to fuck my 1.5 years work on my current set up. VM for now until I find a solid and “complete moron” proof tutorial to go forward.
keep doing what you're doing; if you need to get whatever runs in windows out of a vm and on 'bare metal'--get a separate system for that and network the two to share files, if needed.
I actually do have a laptop that runs windows. It has that shit hybrid Intel/Nvidia graphics that never worked out on linux so I had to put windows back on it. But I don’t/can’t play games on the laptop, it’s very weak and nothing works on it. My PC is pretty decent and I was thinking I can get a separate drive for windows in case I needed it for a game or something. I don’t know. It’s just an idea for now, nothing really major. I hate changing set ups/distro-hopping. Been working on this same endeavour OS install for over a year and it fits my needs perfectly except for the occasional games that just don’t run on Linux. Or a program like yesterday when I bought a new mechanical keyboard (red dragon) and there is no software for it on Linux. It didn’t even work through wine and other means. Ya know, shit like that.
Nothing really major. Mostly curiosity and some times I’d run into a game that I like, but it doesn’t run on Linux. Eventually, I’d either figure out how to make it work, or just say fuck it and let it go.
I have no great solution to games that don’t work. Thankfully it’s increasingly rare. And I get wanting to do something just for curiosity’s sake.
There’s PCI-E pass through to hand direct control of your GPU to the VM if you aren’t already familiar, but my two cents is dual boot is less of a pain.
Thank you. It’s going to be a process. I want to dual but I want Windows to be on its own drive so it doesn’t touch anything else. I honestly don’t even want it near grub. I’m ok with going to it from the boot menu every time, instead of using OS prober and grub. I’ve heard some horror stories of windows just nuking grub and that would hurt badly.
you can backup your EFI partitions, in case you mess them up. I find it a good idea to back them up in any case, I have had EFI partitions get Filesystem corruption.
also the tool rEFInd can work as an alternative boot menu it has the ability to scan the entire system and show all found Bootable OS at boot time.
So with rEFInd, you install it, set it as the default, and it should show windows automatically.
it looks nicer than systemd-boot and grub as well. And it can even show bootable USB flash drives, and has a few other features.
I have to use Rhino 3D for work but refuse to give up my Arch daily driver.
I’ve been a sysadmin since Red Hat came on floppies.
And getting PCIe passthrough, accelerated network and disk drivers, and a whole plethora of other odds and ends working to the point where I could even boot Win11 took two solid days of work.
I’m still not even sure how I did it. I wouldn’t expect anybody else to figure it out.
Next time I plan on experimenting with the Photon libraries.
I’ve been using Linux as my (mostly) sole desktop since 2005. We’ve come such a long way! But CAD/CAM software has always been anemic.
I’m curious about this as well, have had trouble getting it to work well and wondering if I need a second gpu to pass through… But if that’s the case, what does it do for cpu? Pass through some of the cores? Same with ram?
Honestly I’ve just been having better luck running things via proton… Got fusion 360 running fine in bottles with proton ge.
Yes and yes, theoretically you can somehow get single GPU passtrough working but it was never a clean solution for me. CPU and RAM must be shared though.
I am running a 4070 Ti and a 4060 Ti (for the VM trough Looking Glass) and a 5800X3D of which 6 cores and 24GB of RAM go to the VM. Allows me to play any modern AAA game at 1440p perfectly fine. And since there are 2 GPUs I can still use Gnome and run programs like Discord on Linux. But I only use the VM if wine/proton can’t run it.
SR-IOV is the keyword you can start with. I know Nvidia only supports it with pro cards. Didn’t used to be the case, but I think AMD followed suit. I’m not sure on that point. I read recently that Intel is working on it for their Arc cards in the new driver, or something, but I’m really not familiar with anything regarding Intel’s discrete cards.
Yeah, I was about to say when I read the first part. Adding windows manually is quite an old thing. Modern linux setups with grub2 will "find" the EFI loader for windows and add it automatically.
I lost my grub loader when I upgraded hardware recently. But, I just booted into a linux USB, chroot (remembering to mount /boot/efi) and re-run grub install/grub update. That didn't find windows. But, it was fine because I just properly booted into linux and ran grub-update again there, and it found it fine.
Assuming that you are dualbooting from a single storage device - If you have some money to spare go and buy a second ssd. Keeping both OSes in separate storage devices will result in far lesser chances of screwing up.
install linux After Windows and with its own boot partition. if it has foreign OS probe it finds windows and adds a chainloader grub entry. Set linux as default in bios. Windows never knows it is chainloaded and leaves your linux boot alone
This is what I did, I prepared a partition for windows on the second ssd and it went OK.
The only issue was that I needed to manually add drivers on the windows usb for it to be able to recognized my ssd. It was a bit of a pain to find this information online
Not really. I’ve had to do quite a bit of experimentation.
My setup that I’ve settled on:
Rocm system libraries from Arch Linux
PyTorch nightly for Rocm pip installed into a venv (see instructions on pytorch homepage)
Set HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION to 11.0.0. This is just for the RX7600 and it tells it to use the RX7900 code as the pytorch version hasn’t been compiled with 7600 support.
Hmm, that’s weird. I was able to run Stable Diffusion locally with Linux + RX6600.
Probably because I used Easy Diffusion. At first, I couldn’t get the GPU acceleration to work, and I was constantly running out of RAM (Not using VRAM), so my system always froze and crashed.
Turns out it was a ROCM bug, that I don’t know if it’s fixed by now, but I remember “fixing it” by setting an environment variable to a previous version.
Then, it all worked really good. Took between 30 seconds to 2 minutes to make an image.
@BroBot9000 cool. Thanks @alt for the link to Jovian, this might an opportunity to tinker with NixOS... Do you know how nvidia cards is supported ? (nouveau driver is ok for my kind of use).
@flashgnash thanks for reminding me the Pop_OS option... do you know if you can configure Steam to start on big picture mode to start on boot ?
I don’t own any devices with an Nvidia GPU. Therefore, I can’t share my own experiences but only the ones from the community. If my memory serves me right, it should work. However, as usual, expect some strange behavior at times. Thankfully, getting back to a working system shouldn’t cause you any troubles on Jovian-NixOS. Nonetheless, it’s something to keep in mind.
I’m on NixOS using the beta drivers and it does everything as far as I can tell. DLSS, ray tracing all work and performance is the same as windows with the same settings. I don’t think I ever need to go back to windows.
It kind of is, but also kind of isn’t. Don’t get me wrong I love FreeCAD to bits and it’s basically the only CAD program I use these days, but also the recommended workflow is not how any other CAD program works and is a crutch for the topo naming problem. Hopefully it’s a whole other world once topo naming is sorted.
Yeah, it definitely still has a long way to go. I remember back in 2012 it felt impossible to even do basic 3d modeling, but that was more than 10 years ago.
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