Lifetime Windows user seeking feedback for improvements on my Linux setup
I'm currently running Kubuntu in VMware on a Windows 11 host. I was on Windows 10 but was getting lots of display/graphical issues after pulling my desktop out of storage and I didn't qualify for extended support updates and just felt like I needed to eliminate all driver and software issues by reinstalling OS clean. At that point I figured I might as well go to Win 11, so I used rufus and did a clean install without a Microsoft account.
I feel like I need Windows for gaming, even with Proton compatibility on Linux I still expect I'd have some issues with some games and my desktop is my primary gaming system so I just want something that works. But like many others I don't like the direction Microsoft has gone with Windows so I'd really like to adapt to using Linux otherwise. I considered dual booting but I did have an issue with my system where the motherboard had 30+ second long boot times. Like it had nothing to do with my SSD or OS install, the Asus AM4 TUF x570-Plus motherboard boot time was just excessively long and seems other people reported that as well and there was no UEFI/bios update that fixed it. So I really didn't want to dual boot and wait 30+ seconds switching between OSes, that's just not fluid enough for how I wanted to use them. I really want the Windows install to just be gaming only basically or anything I can't get working in Linux.
So that's how I arrived to running Kubuntu in VMware Workstation Pro. I tried Hyper-V first but had issues and bailed on it. Initially I had audio issues with it in VMware but I found a reddit post that linked to the fix, prior to that, ChatGPT was happy to lead me down rabbit holes to nowhere. I do have a few browser issues with video playback, tried in Vivaldi and Firefox, video and audio are in sync but video is choppy and can't keep up with fast motion. It's otherwise acceptable for basic video playback so it's not really a huge issue for me. I tried playing videos in VLC and did not experience any issues so it is capable of smooth video playback in some circumstances on this setup. I have my own Plex server installed on another system but the Plex Linux application just won't work for me, at best it would produce choppy video if I installed from snap but the flatpak install just won't play anything back properly.
The other thing I couldn't quite resolve but mostly resolved is that in my Win 11 host, I have resolution set at 2560x1440 but I can't get that option in my Kubuntu VM. I currently have it as 2048x1152 which is as close as I can get while keeping 16:9 ratio. It will offer resolution options above my host system but not 16:9. I then stretch this to fill screen and run it in exclusive mode so it's basically like my primary desktop interface, but it would be nice if the resolution was better as I can tell it's slightly stretched, text isn't as crisp as it should be.
I will say, I'm quite impressed with how far Linux has come from when I last tried it as a daily driver 10-15 years ago. I added flathub as part of the app discovery repository so I can get many applications through that. I've had a few that I couldn't, scrcpy was outdated there so I had to follow some command line copy/paste script to install that and Vivaldi wasn't available either. Vivaldi did have a .deb file which I guess works like an .exe in Windows, because I just had to click to install, so that's nice. I still think I had to run something to add Vivaldi to app repository so it would keep it updated if I understand how that worked anyhow.
The Kubuntu VM does seem to destabilize quite a bit over time, it's already locked up on me a couple times, but I think it could be a RAM issue, so I've dedicated 12GB of RAM to it right now (it was at 8GB before). If it continues to happen then I guess that reinforces I'm doing something wrong or need to go in a different direction.
I've noticed my boot times have improved, I don't know when this happened, but now the boot times are about 15-20 seconds (I check the BIOS boot time in Startup tab on Windows task manager, but I've timed it and it matches actual time). Still seems kinda long to me but maybe it's fast enough to dual boot now, not sure.
I guess before I commit to anything too heavily, I was curious if what I'm doing now is not very wise or if there's something better I should try. With my bios boot time where it is now, I'd possibly consider dual booting as then I could probably just set up games that work in Linux. At that point, I wonder if I could/should use SteamOS or stick with Kubuntu or something else? Is SteamOS capable of being used as a daily driver OS or is it better just to use for gaming machines?
Also my PC specs are
Asus AM4 TUF x570-Plus motherboard
AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor
32GB RAM
AMD RX-580 8GB
Because of the existing display pipelines, and the lack of proper hardware acceleration, running Linux in a VM is not a good performance comparison to running it on bare metal for video playback or gaming.
The first thing I would recommend is to get an SSD and just dual boot. That 30-second second boot is annoying, but this would be the only way to really verify that it would work for your uses.
Some notes:
The vivaldi .deb file adds the proper .list file to /etc/apt/sources.list.d, so it'll update itself. You can also get a Snap in Kubuntu maintained by Vivaldi, or add Flatpak and use it there (I use the Flatpak on Debian). It should work more or less the same across all three options.
I'd say go for it. The only games I've had huge issues with were either wonky with controllers on my Deck, or multiplayer with either kernel-level anti-cheat, or anti-cheat not configured to play with Proton.
Yes and no, but don't use it on non-Valve hardware. SteamOS is intended for a limited hardware subset. You can use a Steam Deck as your daily driver device, but not SteamOS on anything else with an expectation of a fully working system. It might work well enough for most things, but is not official.
For a suitable alternative (Immutable, image-based deployment, and intended for general use), Bazzite is damn close to SteamOS, but built on Fedora Atomic, and automatically updates its image daily/weekly, providing a very similar experience. I used its sister project Aurora for an amazing 17 months and can comfortably recommend Bazzite, and any Universal Blue project to anybody. In fact, that Aurora install I had started as Bazzite.
I can see that. I'm trying to be cognizant not to hold the VM performance against it. I'm more so evaluating it on its ease of use and ability to functionally do things I would do on Windows, and while the latter part can be impacted by VM performance I'm trying to be lenient in my judgement of it in that respect. But definitely if performance is bad enough I'll be inclined to stop using it which could inhibit my ability to switch to Linux full time. But currently I was looking at setting up Kodi or something and accessing all my NAS media that way, as Kodi also has flawless video playback like VLC even inside this VM.
Hmm, I guess I see the Snap version now, for some reason it didn't seem to come up when I searched it before. The flatpak version still doesn't show up. I am mostly using Vivaldi as a browser that supports PWA for certain web apps since Firefox doesn't currently support it. It's also been a little glitchy in this role (but I'm willing to crack that up to running in a VM as well).
I figured since I'm running all AMD it might be less of a problem especially as they're expanding SteamOS to more than the Steam Deck but since it's not official yet it's probably not a good idea for someone like me to be messing with it until it is officially supported.
Aurora and Bazzite both look interesting. If I switch to a bare metal dual boot setup perhaps I will try one of those.
17 months is an oddly specific amount of time. Why did you stop?
It was odd because that's when I noticed how long it had been. But tracked it to February 2024 as my big full-time switch to Linux.
I swapped over to Debian because it was pretty close to where Fedora was and has consistently been a favorite distro of mine (alongside Arch). I liked everything about Aurora, but also miss some of the flexibility of using a conventional distro, so I decided to use Debian, but carry over everything else I was doing (heavy use of Flatpaks and distrobox) to manage my environment because I liked those integrations, as well.
You're having to do a lot of tinkering with the VM already it sounds like.
I've jumped in and out of daily driving Linux, mostly out, up until recently. First I ran Ubuntu for several years on a work laptop and had very few issues, though occasionally something would break. I find that a key issue is the way that applications share libraries, and when you update a key library for one application it can sometimes break another application.
I said a hard "No" to windows 11 on my newest machine and installed Bazzite instead. It's honestly been a dream for almost everything, gaming included. Here's a few of the worst things I had to do so far:
Other than this, I didn't think I've found a game yet that didn't just work out of the box, and mind you, DCS is notoriously flakey, not to mention Opentrack and SRS being mods/plugins for it.
The one thing I lost was my Reverb G2 VR headset, but I had also lost that on Windows, so in my mind that doesn't count.
And anything else I use on Bazzite is either a flatpak, appimage, or runs just fine in a distrobox or a windows container...no random library updates are likely to stop them from working suddenly.
I appreciate being hesitant to switch, but I think you're probably at a point now where you'll not regret at least dual booting. I suspect you'll eventually stop needing the windows install, at least I'd hope so.
Yes I did initially. It's been a little cleaner after getting over the initial hurdles. To be fair, I think I approached it with a better mindset this time than I have in the past. I just did it because I wanted to try it and didn't expect anything from it. I know people have kept saying this is the year of Linux for the past couple decades and I just didn't let the hype cloud my judgement of what I was getting into. I anticipated having to tinker with it, though ironically perhaps I only had to do most of the tinkering I have because of trying it in a VM rather than bare metal.
Yeah I could find that being frustrating for me because I find dependencies and libraries to be very opaque. It's not obvious to me what applications needs what libraries, what libraries I have or where to get them etc.
The one issue I'd anticipate is that some of the games I'm running I haven't purchased. I assume these are not as simple to run on Linux given the other aspects of what it takes to run these games. I'm not expecting anyone to solve that problem or anything as I understand there are legal and ethical issues behind it, just saying, I expect that it wouldn't work as well if at all, and accept that for what it is, which means I'd still be reliant on Windows to run them.
Overall I think I won't know until I try it as far how much it will cover, but it seems like with the feedback I've got so far, dual booting is the way to go for now.
Just keep using Windows until you get to the point where it is impossible to deal with the barrage of M$ inconveniences. It's undoubtedly going to get worse but it's going to gradually.
Using Linux halfway is going to have twice the annoyances with little gain unless you prefer *nix shells. Just wait until you rip the band-aid clean off.
There's a lot of software that works great on Windows and Linux like nushell. Find these and use them so that when you make the transition you don't have as much pain learning new applications at the same time.
I'd bet my real money that the problems with video playback and resolution options come from running Kubuntu in virtual. I believe if it run in bare metal, you wouldn't experience any of that problems.
The best would be to.dual boot from.different drive, if you can. And try how gaming works for you on that drive as fast as possible to learn if it is worth switching completely or running dual boot for some Windows-only program thag you need once a week.
I don't use Plex, so I don't know about how their client works. When I tried it, I used browser to access my library. Is that an option? Remember that running outside of virtual will very likely fix your video issues in browser.
As for games - Kernel level anti-cheat ones won't work. Otherwise I play what I want on my Linux desktop. You can get an idea how game would run from Steam score/badge on the Steam store page of the game or you can have a look at protondb.com and how players actually.report the game running and what hacks you may want to do. But many times it.just works out of the box.
I don't want to recommend any distro, but I wouldn't use LTS Ubuntu or.other LTS clones. It is stable and you can find many information about resolving various problems but it is just too backwards for gaming, it doesn't have the newest software stuff. Havingnsaidnthat I would likely abandon the Ubunut and clones entirely. But I don't have strong recommendation for what distro... Myself I would pick Arch, but it's not really beginner friendly. Maybe Fedora, which is probably more fresh than Ubuntu and yet it uses .rpm which is the other package format (with .deb being the first one) - my friend switched to Fedora from Windows and he seems pleased.
But first of all - try booting straight to Linux, not VM, to see how it actually runs on your hardware.