I want to get into Arch Linux, but I don’t have that much experience and I feel like it’ll be easier to set it up in a virtual machine rathen than dual booting, I’ve used Oracle VirtualBox before but it’s very laggy. Are there any other VMs that aren’t as laggy, or do I just have a hardware issue?
You used VBox on Windows, huh? Because it works great on Linux and is absolute garbage on Windows. The distro is secondary here. Try VMWare Workstation Player, there’s a free version. Works way better in my experience. As for Arch: Look at Garuda Linux, then try to replicate it on EndeavourOS and you’ll know pretty much everything about customizations you need.
Use KVM and virt manager instead of Virtual box because KVM gives your VM direct access to the bare metal so it runs way better. Virtualbox is running your VM via an abstraction layer which adds overhead and reduces performance.
I’d say VirtualBox is still your best bet b/c of its well-polished user interface - ie unless you plan to play games.
very laggy
Had you installed “extension pack” & “guest additions”? If not, please do! They make a world of difference.
Grab them for the version you’ve installed from VirtualBox downloads directory. Install Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-x.y.z.vbox-extpack on your machine and VBoxGuestAdditions_x.y.z.iso on your VM.
Here’s a decent guide on how to do it for an Ubuntu VM (instructions should apply to Arch too.) Since you’ll be manually downloading guest-additions, just skip the “prerequisites” section.
An here’s a guide on how to install the extension pack.
Pray, post here if you run into any troubles (you shouldn’t ✌️.)
Desktop usage is almost always going to feel laggy in a VM because you don’t have a real GPU inside the VM and it will fallback to some non-accelerated framebuffer mode. There are some GPU virtualization solutions, for example QEMU has virgl that offers 3D acceleration, but in my experience it’s buggy/not ready and doesn’t offer near bare metal performance.
The only way to get near bare metal graphical performance in a VM is by using PCI pass through of an entire GPU, but that requires an extra GPU, is non-trivial to setup and comes with a lot of caveats.
Dunno why are people spreading this myth… Arch is not that hard to install and you don’t get a gold medal for installing it. I installed it with LXDE in an office machine, it only took me an hour.
It depends, I installed it from base, text mode, I had to edit some config file to add my network interface and systemctl restart network etc, then pacman to install X, Xfce, etc, by hand. I guess the best thing is to install Manjaro for instance, it takes a few minutes and you have full GUI and everything.
If your computer is a Linux, QEMU/KVM with libvirtd is great. If you run a Windows 10 or higher, HyperV works great, you should also be able to grab a VMware Player if it’s still free. For Mac you have Parallels I believe.
Gnome Boxes is also great for simple stuff on Linux. Besides there is virt-manager as GUI for libvirt. On macOS UTM is a good free and open source tool.
Add comment