Running windows as guest in endeavour

So, this is a post about virtual machines.

Background is that my oldest child got xbox game pass for his xbox. I realised that I can use that om my computer as well and at the same time.

However, on Linux it’s only streaming and my Internet speed is not quite there. It’s not pleasant playing streamed even if it works OK.

On Windows you can download the games and play them locally, just that permission to play comes from the game pass.

So I’m toying with the idea of running Windows in a VM.

It was a long time since I used vms though and that was on Windows as a host.

For my needs, which one should I use?
QEMU? VirtualBox? VMWare? Something else?

I’m decently tech skilled (working as a software dev and have been interested in computers my whole life).

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With my hardware QEMU/KVM seems to run the best, what works great on my unit may not be the same with your rig.

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QUEMU/KVM is the fastest by far, just make sure you have enough memory, also depends on what kind of games you want to play.

Have fun messing around :wink:

As I’ve understood it QEMU is somewhat difficult to set up.
I’m guessing to really follow the arch wiki is the way to go?

Or is there some other better resource?

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QEMU has a learning curve - if you use virtmanager - the curve is not that steep.

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I’ll look into virtmanager then. Thanks.

I’m guessing the performance is slightly worse with virtmanager then… Right?

performance wise - no, I don’t think so - virtmanager is a frontend for qemu - mainly to assist in setting the properties for the virtual machine.

Virtmanager is a frontend for QEMU/KVM. QEMU/KVM is terminal-based and is a very good hypervisor. You can use QEMU without the front end but as @Root said the learning curve will be long. Virtmanager GUI simplifies the curve and makes KVM very easy to use. And it doesn’t hurt your performance because it’s two things front-end and backend.

KVM is a hybrid hypervisor which means it has elements of a software-based hypervisor (hosted) like VirtualBox and elements of a hardware-based (bare metal) hypervisor like VMware ESXi. So, KVM false in between that’s why its performance is much better than other products.

You’ll be able to find many tutorials on the internet on how to set up a virtual machine with hardware passthrough for GPU, HDD, … etc. But all this would be possible if your hosting computer has enough resources to spare.

Could you run this command inxi -Fxx0Z | eos-sendlog and then post the link here?

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https://0x0.st/H-fm.txt

The command you sent game me errors so I ran inxi -Fxxxz instead

There we go.

No worries. I missed the - in front of the options.

Your processor is good and GPU is ok for running a Windows VM. But my only issue is storage and RAM. You can give 80GiGs for the VHDD and up to 8GiGs as RAM or a bit more as RAM. You’ll be able to play games with minimum requirements. But I’m skeptical about bigger or more famous games.

You can get around the storage issue by using an external HDD. And it would be only RAM that might bottleneck you. But give it a test first if you get everything working then you can try to upgrade.

I can free up some space so HDD should not be a problem tbh.

I have a windows partition that takes about 200gb and if this works I’ll wipe that partition.

The ram is the biggest issue I guess. Luckily I prefer the indie genre and those are usually a lot lighter on requirements.
My youngest son often asks me why I never play 3d games so that should be an indikator. :smiley:

Lots of thanks for the thoughts and suggestions. :heart:

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Yeah if the test works you’ll be able to pass that partition through along with your GPU. Then you’ll basically have a working PC with in your Linux. Good luck. If run into any issues just post them in this forum we’ll try to help you out.

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