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.
Seriously just dual boot. 30+ seconds is meh. Just start it and walk away for a minute. I don't think linux ever really booted very fast for me but booting windows and then screwing around with a VM just to have crap performance because its a VM doesn't sound appealing to me.
Stick with Kubuntu. It just really is whatever. Edit: I don't know what I meant by saying it's whatever? But I doubt SteamOS vs Kubuntu will affect gaming performance much or at all so just use what you know.
Side note, make sure your steam install is from the steam website and NOT from going "sudo apt install steam"
Typically on an SSD Linux boots in seconds, the majority of time is waiting for firmware, which might feel a bit "actually" energy, but when you have reasonable firmware you can be fully booted in ~5 seconds (even on my crappy Lenovo yoga which has barely functioning suspend). As opposed to my desktop which runs an identical setup and takes ~ 30 seconds of which ~ 23 is spent waiting for firmware.
Noob here; is it possible to duplicate my current Linux partition to a different drive without screwing something up? I had limited space on my system's built-in drive when I decided to switch, so I put Linux on a new partition of a external spinning-disk hard drive. With hindsight, I'd like to move to an SSD for the improved performance, but I'm afraid that I'd brick my computer or lose data trying to switch now.
Good question. You will at least want to reinstall the bootloader (bootctl install, assuming systemd) so that the motherboard has the right info on where the bootloader is. You'll need to edit your bootload entries as well, so that they point at the new partitions. You will also probably need to edit / rebuild your fstab. This file is used to decide what disks to mount.
If all of that sounds a bit too intimidating, then bear in mind that just copying your home folder to a new install is very likely to work without any problems at all (at most the uid/gid needs to be fixed up that's a single
chowninvocation). As long as you didn't customize the base system too much that won't cost you very much time at all.The most important thing with Linux is generally: don't panic. You can recover almost anything with a bit of knowledge. I'd definitely keep the old disk around, and I'd definitely prep a USB with linux so that you can chroot if required.
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.
Well I was going to respond to a few other comments here but it seems my early display issues after pulling my PC out of storage were not software related but are hardware issues and today it decided to definitively prove that to the point of making my PC unusable now. Probably about the worst time to be in the market for buying a new GPU or PC hardware in general. Guess I'll reconsider my options when/if I get a functioning PC again. Thanks for all the feedback.
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.
It's less of an issue than you might anticipate. Custom uncompressers and keygens run perfectly fine in wine. Checking ProtonDB is almost always relevant regardless of the distribution method
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 as learning to deal with OS/distro quirks.
I reccomend ripping off the bandaid. These days there are relatively few things not possible, and some slightly more that are really no worse than finding the correct nested path in Windows settings or a regedit.
If you want to retain a dual boot as a backup, UEFI has been a savior there. In the before times, it took 5 minutes to boot a PC. Feel greatful and use the 30 seconds to pee or refill your water ;). Here are the steps to minimize headaches:
This method gets you two seperate EFI partitions, which operating systems usually try to share. Which means Linux won't clobber Windows or vice versa. The only headaches come with Windows updates, and that's easily solved by putting Windows first in the BIOs until they are done.
If you don't need the Windows install for games, with a bit of work using VirtManager, you can probably boot the Windows disk directly as a VM. Even with some video accelleration since you have an AMD card. And in reverse on the Windows install with HyperV.
I originally tried this type of swapping and, while it may completely be due to my lack of understanding and knowledge at the time, it seemed to create more bootloader headaches than should have been.
I'd say rip the bandaid. As fxgn commented, proton.db helps people understand how their games will function on Linux, and honestly, it's now pretty rare that I encounter games that won't work at all.
Most that don't work OOTB just take minor tweaking, and there are a handful that require a bit more. That being said, I don't play many newer games, but Ghost of Tsushima runs native, and Ghost Recon Breakpoint needed a little tweaking.
Online anti-cheat verification is often where issues lie, so if you play a lot of multiplayer games that want kernel access to run their anti-cheat hooks, you might want to keep the dual-boot.
Here's a document I wrote to keep track of all the tweaks I made for my linux machine. It's based on Ubuntu LTS with gnome. My general thinking is that since there's no "one way to do things" in linux, I wanted the visual placement and hot keys to mirror windows as much as possible to minimize the cost of context switching. I used this setup for about a year and was happy with it.
Since it was tuned to my exact use case, it has some setup stuff that may not be relevant based on what you do.
There's also a section on setting up a windows vm using docker. This worked quite well, and it allowed me to run office apps natively. It was always very performant for those kinds of things. I doubt it would be good for gaming. Of course, you shouldn't set this up inside the linux vm, only if you are running it natively.
I actually put Arch on my new Ideapad 1 last week and started something exactly like this. Your format is very nice (mine's still just all mostly lower case text except for OMG PAY ATTENTION TO THIS drafted in Bluefish), and I'm totally going to replicate it.
Which games that you play are you worried about specifically? This context will change a lot about the advice I give on this front. You mention elsewhere that you're concerned about pirated games but whether they're pirated or not matters less than the other specifics.
Well with my current GPU, I probably won't be able to play many, if any, new flagship titles, I think the only flagship title coming up that I may be willing to try even though I'm guessing it won't work so well is GTA 6, and I probably won't play multiplayer on that if that is an option anyhow. As for titles already out, I haven't played Cyberpunk 2077 all the way through, I started it and then my living situation became unstable so I didn't get to complete it so I intend to play that, and then probably just go through a library of various single player games. That part I would have thought would be fine with Linux possibly, but I assumed that various cracks and what not to make those games work without DRM would be problematic when also running through a compatibility layer on an OS those cracks weren't designed to run on.
I had read this post by lou and they seemed to mention running these types of games obtained from less than than legal places not being a smooth process to run on Linux.
For multiplayer games, I don't play much but Rocket League is the main one I do play, and it seems that one is playable on Linux from what I had searched. Occasionally I play coop games with a friend, like Master Chief Collection, Dead Island and so on, just kind of depends on what we both feel like playing and what we have access to.
I'm not under the impression that your gaming library would be particularly hard to play using Proton on Linux. Obviously use Proton DB to check any particular titles, but I don't think your tastes in games remotely justified dismissing it as an option out of hand.
afaik the issues with running pirated games on Linux vs Windows shouldn't differ much, the measures that would interfere with running pirated games on Linux being mostly the exact same things that would interfere with running them on Windows. Running games with Proton could potentially cause separate complications, ofc, but that's highly dependent on the game and relatively rare for singleplayer titles. I haven't really pirated many games, so someone else can speak more to their direct experience, but I do think you're jumping to conclusions here. If you're using external programs to crack games yourself, I can see those not being readily available on Linux, but I'm not convinced playing already-cracked versions is likely to pose as big a problem as you believe. The only thing I can see in the post you linked is lou not wanting to set up Lutris for pirated games since they aren't Steam games, but iirc this amounts to selecting Proton from a dropdown and clicking "okay" for most games.
Yeah I was jumping to conclusions, I didn't have any hard evidence that it would work and it was mostly just assumptions. I don't have a great grasp on the technical understanding of how the compatibility layer works on getting Windows games to run on Linux, but I assumed that whoever is contributing to developing those compatibility layers has no interest in making sure cracks work too, so the conclusion I jumped to is that that cracks wouldn't work or that it would require greater knowledge than I possess to make them work.
Otherwise I agree, just purely on the game library alone, I think most of what I would play would probably work from what I've seen. My basis for thinking it wouldn't was primarily driven by the fact that many games I try out are using some kind of crack software or such.
My limited understanding of how these compatibility layers work is that while it could require extra work to make DRM work, I think most cracks should just work the same way as any other game. Perhaps there are differences based on the type of DRM, I'm not enough of an expert here to be making universal claims by a long shot, but generally speaking a crack would have to be doing something really weird to not interact with the compatibility layer just like any other game without DRM afaik.
Can confirm Rocket League works just fine for me on Linux (using Proton via Steam). Play it every week without a problem. I use Steam for most games and Heroic Launcher for Epic/GOG. I don't have any Linux experience with high-seas sourced games though so can't comment on that
The one gotcha with Rocket League is that by default Steam may try to run the (now tragically outdated and unsupported) native Linux version.
As you say, running the up-to-date Windows version via proton usually works perfectly.
Adding third-party (or "third-party") games to Steam usually works fine, I recently picked up Basilisk 2000 from Itch.io and was able to play it through Steam (after manually enabling proton).
As a bonus you can use sgdboop to quickly set up icons/thumbnails/splashes for your third-party games so they look nice in your library.
Ah yep, very true. I forgot that for some reason they left the completely broken and unusable native Linux version on Steam for some reason. So frustrating and almost feels like they did it on purpose to piss off steam users. Have to tell it to run in compatibility/proton in settings so it installs the Windows build and all good, yeah.
Have you tried checking your account at https://protondb.com?
Not sure what you mean, because Vivaldi is on Flathub
https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.vivaldi.Vivaldi
Overall, I agree with the advice that using Linux in a VM to get used to it is not the best idea. Either dualboot and use it as your main OS, or just keep using Windows.
If you have a lot of memory then the long boot time might just be an AMD thing. I believe it’s called memory training?
Also if you have two GPUs on hand you can run Windows in a VM with GPU pass through. Although it’s possible some anti cheats won’t like running in a VM.
I don't have two GPUs but I thought about that, if I had an integrated GPU even that I could possibly pass the discrete gpu through to a Windows VM. I recall reading in the unraid subreddit that some people said they had done this with their systems and played games that way, I just don't have two GPUs to try it out. I may not even have one GPU at this point but it's too early for me to tell what is currently wrong with my system now that I'm realizing it's a hardware issue and not a software issue. I couldn't even really boot my system on at all yesterday because I had no display output and then when I got a display output the output was so borked that it wasn't usable and sometimes unstable enough that the display output would crash out again. Then today it somehow is working fine, so I need to troubleshoot it some before I make any decisions of how to set up my system.
From what I've been reading here, I have become less concerned with the boot times. My primary concern before is that I felt like I would have to switch OSes a lot if I dual booted, as in multiple times a day. But it sounds like if I had a proper setup, I would probably be able to do so much on Linux that switching to Windows would be such a rarity that the boot time wouldn't be as impactful to my experience.