Basically the windows partition was taking up around 250 gb. And wasn’t even booting into it. Sure I could access it from Linux, but it was literally useless.
Use VirtualBox to make a Windows VM and you pick the USB devices from the menu to connect them on the fly, or you can configure the VM to pass them in by default.
Next time I build a PC I likely will just out of the necessity for consistent driver support in linux. Though AMD cards in windows have always given me lesser results.
What you want sounds like you need something CRIU based where the whole processes are saved and restored. Not sure that is worth it though as it would be rather inflexible if you want the slightest changes in the application state.
It’s okay to dual-boot, or have independent systems. Just a suggestion, to consider.
I have 3 daily driven rigs. A MacBook for work, a Linux laptop for most things personal, and a Windows PC for gaming. Everything serves a purpose and specific use case.
Funny enough, last time I tried to do the whole 2 systems, I had Arch (with GRUB) on one nvme, and windows 11 on another nvme. At some point, all drives were unbootable. I am lucky I had my important data backed up, and on a separate drive anyways.
I had thought about it, but I really want to ditch anything windows.
I may do a VM as I have to find a way to utilize my specialized music gear. I do have to say thank you for pointing me in the direction of Liquidctl though, I want to consider that.
Check out OpenRGB to see if it meets your lighting needs. I use it with Corsair Commander Pro, keyboard, mousepad, RAM, QL fans and the ASUS RGB header and attached lighting. It’s been working great on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for me.
Forget a DE, sounds like you need a WM. Definitely check out some tiling options like i3 or sway, especially since you spend so much time in the terminal.
Use whatever you are comfortable with and works for you. At the moment it sounds like Windows might be the path of least resistance. Fine, go with that.
For me, I finally ditched Windows altogether around 15 years ago. Well, I say ditched - my customers and staff … haven’t.
The list of stuff you have problems with might be tricky on Linux simply because the vendors of music gear are unlikely to give a shit. Nvidia should be fine. I have a VMware VM at home which runs Zoneminder on Ubuntu, with a passed through Nvidia GPU. Surely it should be easier on physical hardware. I wrote this: wiki.zoneminder.com/GPU_passthrough_in_VMWare
You mention gaming so you’ll probably not be bothered with CUDA. You’ll need wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA If that doesn’t do it for you, hit the Arch forums …
The forums can be a bit intimidating but if you keep your query concise and show some evidence of effort, someone will probably get you over the line.
I definitely appreciate your response. I truly want to ditch windows, it would be easy without my music hardware though a VM with USB passthrough may be the ticket. The issues I had with Arch and my 3090 were really with trying to go the wayland route. Though that was over a year ago I gave that a shot. I could try again, but since then I have gotten more familiarized with running arch on other systems. I have tried many other distros, and none quite catch me quite like arch.
For my server I have already ditched windows, and went with a ubuntu server. Though I will be changing distros to something else due to differences in opinion with the way Ubuntu and Canonical conduct themselves. I would still rather see people use Ubuntu over windows, but that’s not much of a bar to pass.
I may eventually check the forums if this time doesn’t pan out with using arch on my main rig.
The logical replacement for Ubuntu is probably Debian. I have quite a lot of Ubuntu servers at work. I am quite seriously considering going upstream. I do like the LTS to LTS promise and that fits well for my customers who like to see enterprisey features without going RedHat or Oracle. You may not have had to deal with “enterprise grade” stuff which loosely translates to bloody expensive and often horrible.
I’m an Arch fan too - actually I’m a Linux fan. I used to do Gentoo (10+ years) but I got tired of my lap overheating. Before that Slackware, Mandrake (Mandriva), RH, Yggdrassil oh and a fair bit of SuSE, not to mention everything Novell did since NetWare 3.1. Whoops, sorry, mind wandering 8)
Wayland and Pipewire will probably do everything eventually but for now, you have functionality gaps. Pipewire is quite amazing and being developed at nearly indecent haste. It might be worth diving in to their community. At worst you will find a lot of like minded people to you.
I haven’t exactly decided on what distro for my server, but I have used forks/offshoots of debian, namely Raspbian or Raspberry Pi OS for my Pis. I understand the hurdles and such that come along with enterprise related products, as I am an IT professional by trade. I haven’t worked with RHEL or Oracle’s offerings yet.
I love Arch, but I too love linux. I never got into Gentoo, but I wanted to try it out just for the experience. I do get annoyed with having to compile everything from source with Arch on my laptop for exactly that reason; lap overheating. I also haven’t used Slackware, Mandrak/Mandriva, Tggdrassil, or SuSE but I have at least heard of them. And I absolutely love the conversation, mind wandering is alright by me!
The tough pill to swallow with linux for me has been the functionality gaps between different offerings, but I love the choices I am given.
I believe that both VirtualBox and KVM (QEMU) can do USB passthrough. With either one you can have the full Windows OS running on your Linux desktop, which could be more comfortable than going for WINE. Here’s an example with KVM and Arch Linux.
KVM has been my go-to for many years of running servers because it is extremely lightweight. Like for example, last year I finally ditched the old poweredge 860 servers (very early 2000’s machines which topped out with a dual-core CPU and 8GB of memory), however from these servers I was running half a dozen virtual linux boxes handling websites and email. Of course running a Windows vm is going to take a lot more resources but any desktop computer that is less than a decade old would easily handle it while still managing your regular linux desktop.
One caveat about KVM, however, is that there’s not really a great GUI interface for it. There IS a monitor to manage the VMs you have up and running, but I always launch new VMs from the command line, which is pretty much just a matter of setting the name and memory, pointing it to an existing image file or ISO, and then using the GUI monitor to launch a VNC remote connection to handle getting a new OS installed or make changes to an existing image to get it on the network. I don’t consider this a burden, but then again I grew up on the command line.
I haven’t explored KVM as an option. Yet, but I am going to be investigating that for my own use case now.
Outside of my laptop and desktop, I did run a Dell PowerEdge (forget the model, but I have a singular Xeon and 64gb of ram in it along with hardware based raid and 8 hdd bays.) that I ran Ubuntu on, but I realized Ubuntu wasn’t the way to go for me due a number of things. So I shut the server down and will be reinstalling another OS on, I haven’t decided yet but maybe Fedora for that. It was just being used to run Docker and Portainer, which I had a good chunk of docker containers running. I had a reverse proxy, Jellyfin, Gluetun, uptime kuma, signal messaging bot for uptime kuma to let me know if a services went down, photoprism, kanboard, a wiki, and a few other services.
I used to run Ubuntu on my servers but abandoned it because it was so unreliable. Things like a “security” update that completely broke the network card drivers, or another one that caused NFS connections to reboot the machine under a heavy load. I switched over to Debian at that point and have never had any problems in the past decade. Since so many people run Arch, I’m guessing it is similarly stable and will be a good choice for you (at least I think you said you were running it in your OP?). I’ll have to look through those services you mentioned, I haven’t heard of most of them.
Well for my poweredge server I ran Ubuntu on it, and my pis Raspbian. As far as desktop/laptop I use Arch, not for stability though it has been stable for my use case but more so for a bleeding edge up to date experience.
As far as the services I ran, they were for media consumption, and some other network tools.
You can passthrough your Rtx 3090 into Qemu to achieve hardware acceleration. With software called ‘Looking Glass’ you’ll get a hardware accelerated Qemu/kvm window instead of sacrificing your second monitor or using a kvm switch.
Level1Linux has made a brilliant videos about Looking Glass.
You should also passthrough a ssd/nvme disk into your Qemu.
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