I use a Windows and Arch dualboot, but I’m looking to escape Microsoft. I’ve heard good things about both Fedora and Pop!_OS. I’m your average Arch user; I play video games and code. Are Windows VMs suitable for games like Call of Duty on such distros ?
I’ve been happily running Fedora Workstation for about 2 years on several devices and desktop environments. Up until the RedHat controversy, I would recommend Fedora. But you should probably try Pop!_OS first. It seems to be easier to use and Ubuntu compatible.
It’s not based on anything mentioned above, but I’d highly recommend NixOS. You just have to copy-paste some things from the nixos.wiki (the unofficial one). You can also view my NixOS config to copy-paste some things.
I don’t get it, which work? On debian I run apt install nvidia-driver and everything works flawlessly. What do the pop_os driver do better? A GUI for that?
Canonical isn’t exactly clean from controversy, and Ubuntu is a rather opinionated distribution. I appreciate how RedHat contributes upstream as much as possible, and how vanilla Fedora is. In my opinion, that makes for a better user experience.
I recently moved from win 10 to Pop os for work related stuff, also I have arch on another ,free time pc, and Mint on my old home server-ish pc.
Pop is pretty good, all necessary stuff is preinstalled, I like how it works out of the box. Games run smoothly, not as smooth as on win but I can give up 5 fps for not being MS(lave)
Mint has more preinstalled packages, feels more bulky but runs ,smoother, on old laptop. Also the ui is more like windows
Why not stay with Arch? Fedora has an uncertain Future due to RedHat. Anything else is probably fine, but it depends on what you want to achieve.
Regarding VM gaming it is working fine for the most part, but there are a few anti cheat engines which block VMs so your milage will vary (Escape from Tarkov, Rainbow Six Siege and I think Valorant don’t work, most other games do last time I checked). Keep in mind you need a mainboard which plays nice with IOMMU, a CPU with enough cores and you probably want two graphics cards. One dedicated for passthrough. If you don’t have a purpose built computer for this your results might not be great.
Playing Windows games in a Windows VM is not escaping Microsoft though, but others already said that.
I concure, i had pop os with virtual machines for windows via kvm/qemu. Total noob but i got it to work somehow. Anyway several games i couldnt play due to anti cheat, i had destiny 2 on my steam account that i cant play do to this problem as i risk my account being banned just for having linux. Eventually after some tinkering i broke my pop os(wanted to use lightdm and lighter desktop enviornment to save ram/cpu).
Only use windows vm for non linux friendly titles i have already paid for. Everything else will be via linux vm for gaming. Since vm is my goto i like keeping my host computer minimum. Also i prefer hdmi audio for my vms as my switch box has an toslink(fiber optic) audio out. Keeps the audio part super easy to add using astros or equivilant gear that have optical support.
I’ve tried every major distro and settled on Arch to receive the latest updates as soon as they exist. Its been pretty solid. But if I had to choose another distro I would choose Fedora, BUT… Red Hat has been a complete asshole, and I’m not supporting their shit.
I’m looking to escape Microsoft … Windows VM … Call of Duty
You’re not escaping Microsoft when putting Microsoft Windows in a VM and you’re not escaping Microsoft either when playing a game series that will be owned by Microsoft within the next few months.
To second what others have said: VM’s aren’t suitable for gaming regrettably.
PopOS is a rather reliable distro, and I personally have loved the window tiling features they added, but it should be noted that they only have LTS from a year ago at the moment. I think that’s just while they work on their new desktop environment, but the older packages might be a tad bit of a transition coming from Arch.
I’ve been running Pop since 2018 (I think?) and have had few issues. It currently pinned to the LTS of Ubuntu while they focus on their home grown Cosmic DE. They still update Kernel/Mesa versions though. Having never really “distro hopped” I put Fedora on a couple of machines when upgrading a couple months ago. I 90% can’t tell the difference. The new Gnome stuff is nice, and Wayland by default is nice. I’d say it’s hard to go wrong with either. Though Arch is more of an “enthusiast” Linux in my mind. Like something you’d have strong opinions about. Any particular reason to move away from it?
I have used many Linux distros, Old-school RedHat (floppy days) Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, etc. I used to like messing around with the kernel and configs, etc. Now I just want something that works so that I can get to work. I installed Pop_OS on an old Microsoft Surface about 3 weeks ago and I have been very impressed. It was simple to install, has a pleasing interface design, and no bloat software. I'm going to keep using it for my desktop and highly recommend it.
I actually have Fedora installed on my desktop, and Pop_OS installed on my laptop! I’ve always been a big fan of the RedHat way of doing things (Yum / DNF & RPMs, the fs organization, etc), but I’ve gotta say, I really prefer the Pop!_OS user experience when I’m in the GUI.
As others have said, it probably doesn’t matter which one you use if your primary purpose is gaming. They’ll both run Steam’s proton engine just fine. If you’re looking for COD, specifically, you’re likely going to run into some issues; ProtonDB says that support for those games is not perfect. But a lot of games will work just as well on linux as they do on Windows with it.
Why not stay on arch? I doubt the experience with VMS will differ between distros, just try it out. And as others have mentioned if your concern is anti cheat than vms might not work since some anti cheats can detect them. If it is not anti cheat than any distro will do, since pretty much anything not anti cheat is playable through proton these days. Another thing to consider is your GPU, keep in mind that if you want to use it for gaming in a VM you need to make a passthrough and you won’t be able to use it for your Linux desktop (I think at least, there might be a way to unload the GPU at runtime, but it’s probably complicated)
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