[practicemaths]

Genuine question. What's the practical difference between duel-booting and running Win-11 in VM?

I understand there's some performance differences, obviously. And VM requires perhaps a bit more setup and understanding.

However, is it reasonable to VM Win-11 to mediate SB concerns AND be able to have access to basic windows software and services since they're used a lot by industry and universities?

i.e. that is I just need access to Onedrive and MS office for the most part.

[not_the_fda]

If its just basic apps, there is no reason to dual boot, a VM is less of a hassle.

If you want to run games, then dual-booting may be necessary if proton won’t work for the game you want to run in Linux.

[dkersten]

GPU passthrough should work for a lot of cases. The games that are most likely to have problems are the ones with draconian drm or anti cheat. I avoid those, so protón tends to work for me anyway, so I don’t bother with windows.

[grotorea]

I quick looked for what you need for that and

> Two graphics cards.

> Hardware that supports IOMMU.

> A monitor with two inputs or multiple monitors.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IOMMU-supporting_hardw...

Plus implied quite a bit of technical knowledge. I think dual-booting might be easier.

[dkersten]

> Two graphics cards

This isn’t technically required, but does make things easier (search “single gpu passthrough). However, an integrated gpu for the host + separate gpu for guest for games is also an option and many modern AMD systems come with an integrated gpu.

> A monitor with two inputs or multiple monitors.

That’s not really necessary, you can use a hdmi splitter or just plug the active gpu in (I mean, if you’re dual booting you can only access one system at a time, so shouldn’t be an issue — you can plug an extension cable into your monitor so that and have a dedicated cable for each gpu, that way you don’t need to mess with plugs at the devices — I actually did this for a while to share my monitor with a games console)

Yes, it’s not the simplest thing to set up, but it does avoid the issues down the OP while still allowing gaming.

Personally, I never bothered because everything I want to play works on proton.

[mveety]

This is anecdotal but I use pci passthrough and drm hasn't yet been much of a problem except for older games.

[dwattttt]

It prevents Windows from running under it's own hypervisor, which it does to provide additional security (some configurations allow certain crypt operations to happen "outside" Windows).

[jansommer]

It would work great if NVIDIA, AMD and Intel made high end consumer GPU's that could be shared between host and guest. So far we can only share Intel iGPU's - at least on paper, because I haven't managed to make it work.

... Or hack NVIDIA gpu's and potentially brick your 2000$ card...