I’d like to run Linux Mint with Windows in a virtual machine for some apps like Affinity, some games and more… I’d like it to be primarily AMD… So I figure I’d need 32 GB of RAM, and maybe 1TB SSD… But what would you guys suggest for the optimal experience. I don’t need the absolute best in framerate in games, but an average good performance, maybe par 4060(ti) for mobile, or something?
Most games run good under wine/steam. Most of the ones that don’t are using programming techniques intended to catch a vm, hypervisor or host os like anti-cheat.
So you can probably take gaming off your vm uses list. If you can’t because you wanna run games that use anti cheat as above, skip to the bottom of this reply.
I do not use affinity, but my experience with applications that have an “output” like design, modeling or productivity is that it’s often not worth it to run the under some compatibility layer or virtualization system. Every time you start that program up you need it to run so you can blast out an idea, show someone how the project is going or open something someone sent you and it’s infinitely more frustrating to have to figure out what changed since last night to make it not work or cause the magic marker brush (and only the magic marker brush!) to cause an immediate crash. This might also be a “jump to the end” scenario. Try it first and see though!
Windows 11 has relaxed requirements for its iot versions. It both loads less into cache and requires less memory in addition to opening up to CPUs as far back as third and fourth generation Intel core chips from 14 years ago. So use that version of windows for your vm and you can easily scrape by with 16gb of ram if you see yourself needing to.
Most people like amd gpus better on linux, I tend to like nvidia better at the moment. I have a lot of experience with linux and high tolerance for troubleshooting though so your mileage may vary.
This is some counterintuitive input and I will not be answering questions about it, take it or leave it: if you plan to keep your computer for a while, buy something with a cpu manufactured on the largest “process” you can reasonably accept. As chips’ features get smaller and smaller it takes less time and energy for electromigration to fundamentally change their behavior.
If you find yourself needing to run games or even software packages that care deeply about knowing they’re on bare metal windows, just dual boot. It will only take a little time to boot back and forth and the only prerequisites are learning your distros grub repair process for if windows overwrites your bootloader and keeping backups so you don’t panic which you should be doing anyway.
Thank you for your opinion. It wasn’t really an answer to my question, but as an opinion, it was a good read. :-)
What were you looking for, models and specs?
E: you are absolutely looking for models and specs. I assumed you were just feeling around to figure stuff out because of your other posts in this comm. My apologies.
The short answer is that it doesn’t matter for the requirements you’ve given. Just to make sure I wasn’t lying when typing that I created and ran a windows 11 vm under kvm running on Debian installed on an old thinkpad from ten years ago and it ran fine. The specs were i5-3320m 16gb ram. I was able to start and run affinity and nuclear throne. I only made a 30gb qcow device for that vm so you probably don’t need a 1tb disk…
Assuming you want to run more modern games, both the recent (<5 or so years ago) intel and amd integrated graphics perform decently on 1440 and 1080 which is what a lot of laptops have for screens.
Laptops with replaceable ram are rarer than they once were, but can still be had and any laptop with ddr4 will be less expensive than one with ddr5. You don’t seem to have any use case that needs faster ram, so that’s a cost/performance tradeoff you may be willing to make.
I would personally stay away from “gaming” oriented laptops because they’re generally optimized around performance and price with build quality, durability and longevity left by the wayside.
So for specs I’d say a recent cpu with igpu (it’s hard to find one in a lap nowadays that doesn’t have the igpu!), 16gb of ddr4 if it’s upgradable and 32gb of ddr4 if it’s not and maybe 512gb of storage if it’s soldered and 256 or whatever if it’s not.
Again, if you have specific games you want to run then that changes things.
Well, this is my first post here, so please elaborate - which other posts?
I’m not looking for exact models or specs. Just something like R5-xxxx or R7-xxxx or R9-XXXX with 780m and 16 or 24 GB of RAM is enough to run it fluently… Or whatever people have experienced…
Pardon, your replies in this comm. It’s not precise language on my part but I think the meaning should be clear.
Without knowing what games you want to run or what your budget is it would be hard to give more helpful input than “anything will work, give serious consideration to not virtualizing”.
Aren’t radeon graphics card better supported these days?
They should be… Which is why I am looking for AMD specs here.
you will find stripped down versions of windows (i.e windows 10 lite) with low ram consumption. I run windows 10 with 2GB of RAM. Of course if you will play games you would need a lot more than that.
Virtualmachines dont usually provide good experiance for graphics intense apps. I would strongly recommend wine or proton instead.
steam runs on Linux so if your games on steam you may not need windows.
But as I wrote in the title, I’m going to run Win11… :-) I was thinking about Oracle VirtualBox…
yes there is also windows 11 lite / tiny11 and yes I usually VirtualBox is fine.
Make sure your laptop bios allows iommu to be enabled. This is the only way I know to pass your GPU directly to a VM. And even this is still pretty fiddly.
Don’t dismiss the steam/proton rec. Or dual boot.
I had a 3080 mobile gpu in my last laptop and I wouldn’t touch Nvidia again. Having the gpu just work like it does with AMD is worth too much to me, even if I’m leaving behind more horsepower. The new strix halo 395 with its igpu seems like the killer Linux build to me now.
This is a very advanced use case. Be warned.
Let’s first talk about the software you need. This determines the hardware you need to run it.
For the windows VM you need a few things:
- graphics accelerator (GPU)
- virtual display
- input devices
- audio output
To get the GPU, you probably want to pass through a GPU into the VM with iommu. When doing this, you still want your host OS (linux) to have a GPU as well, so you’ll need 2. Use the integrated one for linux, and the dedicated for windows. Make sure that the laptop display is connected internally to the integrated GPU, not dedicated. Otherwise your linux environment would be uninteractable.
Not sure if you can then use the dedicated GPU on linux when the VM isn’t running or not though. You can look this up probably.
Then, for the virtual display and input device, you want to use Looking Glass. It requires you to have a hardware GPU on both the VM and the host, but it allows you to have a latency free interface to the VM. It’s fucking great.
Audio really depends on your situation. If your motherboard’s builtin audio card is in the same IOMMU group as your dGPU, you’re fucked and you’ll need a USB DAC. That shouldn’t be the case though, it’s usually in your iGPU’s group.
Now for the hardware. From the above, you’ll need:
- 2 GPUs (1 for linux, 1 for windows)
- Mainboard firmware that supports IOMMU
- Audio NOT in the same IOMMU group as the windows GPU
- AMD/Intel GPU for linux, NVIDIA for windows as recommended by Looking Glass. I’ve personally had success with Intel for windows as well though.
- Your display must be connected to the linux GPU.
