Some game anti-cheat can detect VMs and will still block you. Dual booting is the highest compatibility path if that’s what you value the most. Your choice of distro here doesn’t matter too much, if you do go the VM route.
As far as distro choice for day to day needs, I’m a big fan of NixOS. Setup your whole system with a config file, track it with a VCS and you have an extremely consistent and flexible OS that let’s you build nearly any environment you want without messing with the rest of your system.
Yep, you’re doing it right… or at least that’s how I do it as well, lol 😂.
A snapshot is exactly that, a snapshot. It doesn’t take forever to create, like with rsync, it litelarly takes a second, even on very old rigs (775 or even older). It’s basically a snapshot of what the current drive holds. If a file changes (gets added, removed, whatever), the snapshot grows cuz it needs to hold the older versions of the files (the ones saved at the time of the snapshot).
This might not be exactly how snapshots work in BTRFS, but this is what I gathered from using it with snapshots enabled. The older the snapshot, the larger the size of the snapshot (takes way more room cuz more changes have occured).
Also, it’s wise to set up daily, weekly and monthly snapshots. I have it set up to hold 5 or 6 (can’t really remember now) daily snapshots, 4 weekly and 2 montly. So basically, I can go back in time for a max of 2 months. I was thinking or raising the montly snapshots to 3 or 4, but I’m still not sure. Still, I wouldn’t go lower than 2.
Nah, I got it set up on a P4 with a 20GB drive, takes about 2 or 3GB. As time progresses, older snapshots get deleted automatically by Timeshift 😉. So, say you got 4 daily set up, 4 weekly and 2 montly. Only the last 4 daily, 4 weekly and 2 monthly stay, the rest are deleted as new snapshots are created. That’s the while point of having this setup, so you can go back in time, but you decide how long.
I take full system backups every three hours, but the backups are thinned so that there are previous 24 hourly ones, previous n daily ones, previous m monthly ones, etc. Similar approach can be used with snapshots.
I don’t currently use snapshots—I don’t run btrfs anymore—but when I did, I did a snapshot every hour and kept them for 24 hours. But then I backed up the latest snapshot, which gives consistent backups, versus regular backups where files can change while you’re doing them. I’m nowadays using bcachefs, but I don’t quite trust its snapshots yet so I haven’t started using them ;).
Haven’t heard of this FS, so I checked the specs… was actually hoping to see a working RAID5/6 feature, but as it stands now it only supports RAID1/0/10. Too bad, would’ve considered it as a viable option to mdadm + BTRFS.
It said the code base was build on something stable, but it didn’t say what, do you happen to know what FS this project is a fork of?
Too bad, would’ve considered it as a viable option to mdadm + BTRFS.
Currently I’m using bcachefs with LVM (which can do raid, but I currently only have one NVME SSD), though it indeed does have RAID1/0/10 support. But overall I expect it not to not make the same silly default choices as btrfs, such as not being able to start the system if a RAID1 component of your root filesystem is missing. And, supposedly, when the RAID5/6 becomes stable, it won’t have the write hole problem.
It said the code base was build on something stable, but it didn’t say what, do you happen to know what FS this project is a fork of?
It’s based on bcache :) by the same author, but of course bcache is not really a file system but rather some kind of object storage layer for the purpose of caching slower block devices and absorbing write load.
Bcachefs might be coming soon to the mainline kernel, so that’s going to make it a lot easier to try out. Personally however I have lost one bcachefs (that FS was readable, though, and I have good backups), but I have also lost a btrfs before and seen reiserfs bugs, so I don’t too heavily count it against it; overall I enjoy its stability when using basic functionality. I haven’t dared trying snapshots with it yet…
Depends on your needs and if you want to include changes made to documents in home for example while you work during the day. For me the OS just does snapshotting when packages are updated so I can rollback if something breaks. The rest I do normal backups. because snapshotting is not backup if its on the same machine. Btrfs Send will let you push a snapshot elsrwhere though.
Have you considered Mint? I tried PopOS but found the support wasn’t great. Mint is also based on Ubuntu but adds extra functionality and skips some of the dumb stuff Canonical is pushing (i.e. snaps for everything).
As far as games: VM’s are not really a good bet unless maybe you’ve got multiple video chips and are willing to invest time in getting GPU passthrough working (and then you really haven’t escaped Microsoft so why not just dual-boot).
I’ve found that games on Linux (particularly Steam games) with Proton are pretty damn good and only getting better over time. Valve has put a lot of work into that with the Steam Deck (which also runs on Linux) and the non-valve versions also sometimes cover stuff that can’t (like certain copy protections).
Your can see the rating for games on Linux with Proton here
Just reaffirming that my experience getting Activision/Blizzard stuff working on Linux has been mixed. I played older games that weren’t that GPU demanding, Hearthstone & Starcraft II, but the launcher would break pretty much every other update.
Mint is a great & everything works pretty much out of the box.
My understanding is that Fedora works pretty well for people gaming, GloriousEggroll, the guy that puts out the GE proton patches, contributes to Fedora, I think. Though you might want to check out NobaraLinux it is based on Feodra, but ships with additional goodies for gamers: Nvidia driver support, kernel patches, Discord, etc. <a href="">https://nobaraproject.org/</a>
Anything that you launch through Steam should also work, irrespective of your OS.
My understanding is Nobara is made by GloriousEggroll, which is why it’s so good for gaming. It worked really well for me except for the fact that some games didn’t like the hybrid Nvidia graphics on my laptop. I ended up swapping to Pop because of that, and everything works like a charm. I’d rather be on Nobara tho. I really don’t like Pop’s desktop environment.
You can probably install a different desktop environment for pop, usually it’s just a command and then there’s a menu in the corner of your login page where you can change the desktop environment.
Yeah, I know it’s possible, but I’m not a linux expert and I’d rather leave well enough alone. It works and it’s not Windows and that’s good enough for me!
Of course, whatever works best for you. I guess when you get annoyed enough just know switching desktops not as complicated as it might initially seem lol.
I have an older gaming laptop with integrated graphics and a 1050 GPU, haven’t had any issues.
I love Nobara, it just worked right from the jump. Website has the hash right on the page, .iso already set to go, just create a bootable, plug it in and install.
You can, but can you do accelerated graphics within the VM environment?
My last foray into this with KVM/Qemu (the system native to Linux) was that accelerated graphics virtualization was still pretty twitchy, requiring various protocols which were still a bit immature (libvf, looking glass) or only available on a subset of hardware (vGPU,SR-IOV)
The docs on single GPU passthrough indicate one must detach from the host and assign to the guest (and rely on SSH or remote-screen apps etc to control the host).
PCI passthrough is the best option I’ve heard but basically involved the Linux host using the lower-powered GPU (possibly an integrated graphics chip) and then the guest given passthrough access to the gaming card.
If you’ve got good documentation on how to do this less painfully, I’d love to give it another shot. I’m pretty happy with the Proton performance on most stuff but there’s definitely a few games that I’d love to move to a virtual system if it performs well
Using KVM, you can use do full GPU pass through to any OS from your host without a need for a second GPU (including integrated graphics).
Works with AMD and nvidia cards, I’ve even done this with a macOS VM.
Here’s a guide that’s the easiest I’ve found to follow. It includes some automated scripts.
github.com/BigAnteater/KVM-GPU-Passthrough - this guide is for Arch Linux, but the scripts and configs should work the same on any OS, you’ll just need to make sure the correct packages are installed.
Like you mentioned, there are some hardware requirements to do this, but most modern hardware supports it. Also, if you are running the VM then using SSH to control your host is probably your only option, but shutting down your VM should take you back to your display manager so there’s no rebooting.
I used this set up to play warzone for a while, performance was just as good as windows on bare metal.
Some notes from my experience:
if you upgrade your host’s kernel, then reboot before trying to start your VM.
2 There are 2 scripts that will be built for you, vfio-startup and vfio-teardown. They will unload and reload kernel modules as needed so you’ll want to check if they are needed. My nvidia drivers are built into the kernel, so I couldn’t unload them, which stalled the VM startup.
It might take some trial and error, if your VM doesn’t start after you attach the GPU then check the logs under /var/log/libvirt (or wherever your libvirt logs to)
Creating a snapshot is not the backup itself. It is basically freezing the current state of your files from this point on and then remembering what has chanced compared to the snapshot. So yes, it is normal that this takes no time since nothing is copied on your hard drive. If you want to backup the snapshot you need to make an actual backup of it. This is possible with btrfs. But since I haven’t done it yet, I can’t tell you the exact command.
Copy on write is the difference. As I understand it, a btrfs snapshot takes no space when it’s created (beyond the file system record). The filesystem is always writing changes to file chunks as a new copy of the chunk, which is then recorded as a replacement of the old chunk (which is still present on-disk). So a snapshot tracks all of these later changes, and the file system keeps the old file chunks preserved as long as you keep the snapshot. That’s why you can mount a btrfs snapshot. It just shows you the volume through the lens of all of these saved changes.
When you delete a snapshot you are then marking these preserved chunks as free space. So that is also quick.
I know it won’t be the same response, but using the AUR with Pamac on EndeavourOS has been a good experience for me. It doesn’t let me break the system since it’s all graphical and I haven’t had any issues with suspect packages or anything like that. And enabling Flatpak/Snap I can install those programs I might not trust, like the Miru streaming app.
I had the same thought process seeing the software repository on Linux Mint for the first time. It really is set up like a MacOS or general Appstore interface.
Happy for your brother getting comfortable with Linux so quickly! Way to go!
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