Dual boot would be advisable.

A virtual machine can work, if you have good luck with PCI-E passthrough, otherwise, virtual machines are not for playing any serious games.

otherwise, virtual machines are not for playing any serious games.

On the contrary, I consider visual novels very serious business

Aside from visual novels, most games won't work in virtual machines without a dedicated graphics card passed through. You would need to use VFIO. Dual-booting, on the other hand, only requires you to have another storage device on your computer.

Some games, like Rainbow Six Siege, will ban you if you use a virtual machine with VFIO GPU Passthrough, so that's something to keep in mind too.

otherwise, virtual machines are not for playing any serious games.

On the contrary, I consider visual novels very serious business

Aside from visual novels, most games won't work in virtual machines without a dedicated graphics card passed through. You would need to use VFIO. Dual-booting, on the other hand, only requires you to have another storage device on your computer.

Some games, like Rainbow Six Siege, will ban you if you use a virtual machine with VFIO GPU Passthrough, so that's something to keep in mind too.

Okay, thank you. I suppose I'll just stick with the dual boot solution I got. Now to figure out how to add the second Windows disk to Grub because it refuses to show up.

There is no other option except dual boot?

Options aren't great if you have a title that specifically refuses to support Linux:

1. Stop playing these games. Not exactly a great option, but still an option.
2. Dual boot
3. VM with GPU pass-through. I might be wrong, but I think this option also requires you to use a second, different GPU? And with GPU prices being what they are, that's not great.
4. Use a separate PC/laptop configured with Windows
5. Hope for a change of heart from these devs/publishes and that they'll support EAC/Battleye in Linux. It happens, but note that EAC-creator, Epic, have publicy refused to do so, as have Bungie for Destiny 2. I haven't heard flat out refusal regarding Rainbow 6 though.

3. VM with GPU pass-through. I might be wrong, but I think this option also requires you to use a second, different GPU?

Not strictly. If you're passing through a GPU to the VM then that GPU is no longer available to the host. So the host either needs to have its own GPU (integrated graphics are fine for that) or have no GPU (so you're doing stuff entirely from the command line for the time that the VM is running).

But I'm also a Linux noob...
Linux Distro: Nobara

It's not a great idea to use random niche distros when you're new.

Niche distros are going to have issues that you'll have to work out how to fix yourself because they're niche. And you won't know how to fix them yourself because you're new.

Something mainstream that loads of people use - so issues are found quickly, and widely solved quickly - is what you want when you're new.

Do client side anti-cheat systems even allow VM usage?

Do client side anti-cheat systems even allow VM usage?

Pleasereadthemanual, above, notes that while they "work", VMs can sometimes be detected as bad, and apparently Rainbow Six Siege has been know to ban over this. I'm not sure the complexity and risk is worth the pay off, honestly.

Nobara is mostly Fedora smoke and mirrors, I don't think that's especially "niche". It's probably Fedora's grub configuration. These distros may have their own GUI tools, configuration changes, custom packages for some things but the guts are generally like the parent distro. Their repositories are rpm-fusion, fedora and nobara

Back in the good old days, I used to not care what distros people were using. It was easy enough to post distro-agnostic solutions. Nowadays there are too many distros that think they are cleverer than anybody else.

Smellbringer, if you want help with Grub, I need information

sudo dmesg > dmesg.txt

(sudo, because by default the kernel configuration will not allow unprivileged users to access the kernel log buffer and most distros won't change that)

/boot/grub/grub.cfg

Note: I think it might actually be /boot/grub2/grub.cfg in that clever distro.

Get me those two files (the resulting dmesg.txt and grub.cfg) for starters and I'll take a look. If you know which device (e.g. "/dev/sd??" or "/dev/nvme???") is your Windows drive that would help.

What may be happening is that grub-mkconfig (the grub autoconfiguration scripts) or whatever "update-grub" wrapper they use is not even "scanning" that hard drive. I'm assuming it's properly connected to the system and the kernel detects it.

Another alternative would be to simply go into your UEFI (assuming again) BIOS and make that drive the boot drive when you want to boot Windows. This is assuming that the Windows drive is standalone and can boot the system (has its own EFI partition if applicable etc.). For example, the computer originally had Windows on it and you took that drive out?

Last edited by Grogan on 21 Aug 2023 at 6:53 pm UTC

I got to thinking, maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Have you actually tried updating the grub configuration? I shouldn't assume.

sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

The os-prober might actually find it.

Otherwise, they still do provide /etc/grub.d/40_custom for manually adding menu entry stanzas.

Fedora (and Nobara) do things a bit differently, the actual boot entries are separate files in /boot/loader/entries with non human-friendly names. They call this the BootLoaderSpec, or "BLS". (The B should stand for Bollocks, but I digress)

There's not much point in showing grub.cfg because that's not where the boot entries are generated anymore.

Alright, so I decided on a new setup. Wiped my 1TB SSD that was holding my emulation stuff and installed Windows on that for online games, namely CoD and Fortnite but Halo Infinite also performs like ass on Linux with various crashes (turns out it's rated Bronze for a reason) so I'm gonna have to look into installing that on Windows too.

With everything else I just reformatted my 2TB and 4TB drives to ext4 and should be good from there, thank you.

But I'm also a Linux noob...
Linux Distro: Nobara

It's not a great idea to use random niche distros when you're new.

Niche distros are going to have issues that you'll have to work out how to fix yourself because they're niche. And you won't know how to fix them yourself because you're new.

Something mainstream that loads of people use - so issues are found quickly, and widely solved quickly - is what you want when you're new.

From what I understand it's mostly a fork of Fedora so I figured solutions that would apply to Fedora would apply to Nobara. Also my first time using Linux back in 2019 was on Ubuntu and I still have a bad taste for Ubuntu from that. I heard Nobara was recommended for gaming and that it had a Steam Deck mode. Which I wanted because I was planning on using my PC on my TV as well and ChimeraOS seemed too restrictive for my tastes.
So far it's going great, issues that I bumped into on Nobara seem largely the same any Linux user would have. Such as figuring out how to mount drives and ensure they auto-mount at the start of every session, how to properly format a drive for Linux. My problems have mostly been using other drives honestly, lol. Things that made me tear my hair out in 2019 like Bluetooth drivers and GPU installation just seem to work.

But I'm also a Linux noob...
Linux Distro: Nobara

It's not a great idea to use random niche distros when you're new.

Niche distros are going to have issues that you'll have to work out how to fix yourself because they're niche. And you won't know how to fix them yourself because you're new.

Something mainstream that loads of people use - so issues are found quickly, and widely solved quickly - is what you want when you're new.

I disagreed with this but I had been having issues with Halo Infinite that no other distro seemed to have. So I swapped to PopOS and that solved it. The game used to crash every game but now I was able to go a whole hour non-stop. On top of that PopOS also can max out my monitor's refresh rate of 170hz as opposed to Nobara which crapped out above 144hz.

In other words, you were right and one shouldn't hop onto niche distros they hear about. I'm sorry.

Last edited by Smellbringer on 22 Aug 2023 at 11:28 pm UTC