Ubuntu has too many problems for me to want to run it. However, it has occurred to me that there aren’t a lot of distros that are like the Ubuntu LTS....
Ubuntu used to bring a bit of spit and polish at a time when most Linux distros lacked that. Nowadays it brings nothing worthwhile to the table anymore, it’s just brand recognition, but what it does bring is aggravation for experienced users.
I had this realization a few years ago when I found myself fighting against 20.04 and I asked myself: what exactly is Ubuntu doing for me that plain Debian can’t? The answer was nothing really, so I moved all my Ubuntu VMs over to Debian Bullseye and never looked back.
That’s not GPU passthrough. That just enables VirGL, which is a translation layer that passes some OpenGL calls through to the host’s Mesa installation. It has rather poor performance though, it’s extremely limited and is rather buggy too. You certainly can’t use it for cutting edge gaming.
GPU passthrough is when you pass through an entire GPU device as-is to the virtual machine. That is: if you have an Nvidia RTX 3060, the guest operating system will see an Nvidia RTX 3060 and it can use the native drivers for it. This gives you near-native performance for gaming.
Now, I didn’t even know this was possible with VirtualBox (if so: cool!), but it’s certainly doable with KVM if you have the right motherboard and GPU combination. I have done it, but it is quite the hassle indeed though that isn’t really KVM’s fault.
It does work with AMD GPUs too, I did it with an RX6800XT myself, but there are some (most…) AMD GPUs that have a reset bug which means they hang if you reboot the guest and you need to powercycle the physical host machine to make the GPU usable for the guest again.
Be warned though that this is just the start of the journey. There are all kinds of issues that you need to deal with and decisions that you need to make if you want to practically use it for gaming, and those require lots of googling, piecing bits of information together from all over the place, and trial and error. From memory these are things I had to deal with:
How to handle storage? Just a qcow2 file or pass through a partition or drive?
How to handle mouse and keyboard input? Emulated or through a passed through USB port? Both have their pros and cons.
Audio is a pain in the ass… emulated it either crackly or laggy. There is a way to pass it through to pipewire through a unix socket, but it’s convoluted to setup. Or perhaps you can pass an entire audio device through to your guest?
Bluetooth audio, for my wireless headset, was an even bigger issue because audio did not get routed correctly to the headset if I just connected to the host. In the end, I got a separate bluetooth dongle for my VM, and passed it through.
How do you handle the display between guest and host? Two separate monitors? A monitor with dual inputs, and toggle between them? Or something like looking-glass, which sounds appealing but again introduces issues like vrr not working properly, and your GPU will probably need a dummy “dongle” to work without an actual monitor connected.
Then there’s the CPU and how to divide the cores between guest and host: for best performance, the guest’s cores need to be reserved, and should take into account the CPU topology. For example, I have a 5900x and reserved the 6 cores on one CCX for my VM , leaving the other 6 for my host.
For more information, there’s the /r/VFIO subreddit. Yeah I know, f*** reddit, but it has a lot of useful information. The looking glass site has some FAQs too, even on things not directly related to looking-glass itself. There is some VFIO discussion on the level one forums as well, but they’re not so active.
Anyway if all this sounds like a cool project to spend a few weeks on, I heartily recommend you try it. I sure enjoyed setting this all up and getting it working, but I spent way more time configuring and troubleshooting things than I did gaming with that setup, and in the end I decided that just gaming on Proton and occasionally dual booting for problematic games is a much more practical solution.
“Building with concrete blocks? What is even wrong with you, where you never thought proper construction? What do you mean cheap building costs? People who want to build cheap buildings shouldn’t be allowed to build anyway”.
The internet suddenly makes a bit more sense to me
You don’t have to choose just one though. It’s perfectly ok to share a directory via Samba for Windows clients and share the same directory again with NFS for Linux clients.
I’m curious how software can be created and evolve over time. I’m afraid that at some point, we’ll realize there are issues with the software we’re using that can only be remedied by massive changes or a complete rewrite....
We need a networked file system with real authentication and network encryption that’s trivial to set up and that is performant and that preserves unix-ness of the filesystem, meaning nothing weird like smb, so you can just use it as you would a local filesystem.
This is not anti-homeless. This is anti-idiots sitting on the window sill of the house you live in, making it a gathering place and a nuisance of themselves. A window sill is not a bench in the park.
This doesn’t even have anything to do with homeless people. Homeless people don’t sleep on a window sill.
I personally know a few places in my city where people have resorted to putting spikes on their window sills like that. It has everything to do with anti-social people who think someone else’s window sill is a perfectly good place to sit around all night, make noise, drink alcohol, do drugs, leave their garbage, damage the property, …
The spikes are put there out of desperation when talking to people and talking to the police hasn’t helped.
There is a big correlation between homelessness and mental illness, personality disorder, addiction or a combination thereof. So yeah, excuse me if I don’t want to deal with the paranoid schizophrenic hobo who’s high on god knows what.
I can’t speak for the US here, but in most civilized countries there is actually help available for homeless people and enough social systems to ensure that well adjusted people don’t end up homeless in the first place. With the homeless that we do have, the difficulty usually lies in reaching them, getting them to accept the help that is available and having them durably make the necessary changes to their life to escape homelessness.
Accepting some of their anti-social behaviors is actually enabling it, and not helping them at all.
I know Nvidia has a reputation for being bad with Linux. Is it better now? And most of all, what would be the best GPU for modern gaming on Linux (any distro)?
one could say RH is leaching on FOSS projects anyway
Not “one could say”, that’s exactly how it is.
Red Hat is standing on the shoulders of thousands of FOSS projects, and all that is asked in return is that they should allow others to stand on their shoulders too.
Well the C64 didn’t come with a numpad either, and the tenkeyless format is way more popular than full sized keyboards with mechanical keyboard enthusiasts, at which this keyboard is aimed.
I went numpadless 12 years ago with a Filco TKL, never looked back. A full size keyboard just feels awkward to use now with all the deskspace it takes up.
So now what distro are we running for LTS desktops?
Ubuntu has too many problems for me to want to run it. However, it has occurred to me that there aren’t a lot of distros that are like the Ubuntu LTS....
I AM SO DISAPPOINTED WITH UBUNTU 24.04 😡 (news.itsfoss.com)
Microsoft Just Released MS-DOS Source Code! (github.com)
Windows 10 will soon start nagging you to switch from local account to Microsoft Account (www.neowin.net)
VirtualBox 7.0.16 Released with Initial Support for Linux 6.8 and 6.9 Kernels (9to5linux.com)
Anon's brother hates concrete (sh.itjust.works)
Transformation complete (lemmy.world)
Samba vs NFS vs SSHFS ?
Hi everyone !...
Are there any things in Linux that need to be started over from scratch?
I’m curious how software can be created and evolve over time. I’m afraid that at some point, we’ll realize there are issues with the software we’re using that can only be remedied by massive changes or a complete rewrite....
Art posting (lemmy.world)
oWo (lemmy.world)
Don’t worry everyone, I’m sure someone somewhere is worse and that makes this okay somehow.
My wife was unimpressed by Vim (programming.dev)
Best current/last gen gpu for Linux compatibility?
I know Nvidia has a reputation for being bad with Linux. Is it better now? And most of all, what would be the best GPU for modern gaming on Linux (any distro)?
In a First, AlmaLinux Patches a Security Hole That Remains Unpatched in Upstream RHEL - FOSS Force (fossforce.com)
Anyone else unable to log out of Plasma 6?
On one of my machines, I am completely unable to log out. The behavior is slightly different depending on whether I am in Wayland or X11....
8BitDo’s latest retro keyboard is an ode to the Commodore 64 (www.theverge.com)