keyboard

This is a very advanced use case. Be warned.

Let’s first talk about the software you need. This determines the hardware you need to run it.

For the windows VM you need a few things:

• graphics accelerator (GPU)
• virtual display
• input devices
• audio output

To get the GPU, you probably want to pass through a GPU into the VM with iommu. When doing this, you still want your host OS (linux) to have a GPU as well, so you’ll need 2. Use the integrated one for linux, and the dedicated for windows. Make sure that the laptop display is connected internally to the integrated GPU, not dedicated. Otherwise your linux environment would be uninteractable.

Not sure if you can then use the dedicated GPU on linux when the VM isn’t running or not though. You can look this up probably.

Then, for the virtual display and input device, you want to use Looking Glass. It requires you to have a hardware GPU on both the VM and the host, but it allows you to have a latency free interface to the VM. It’s fucking great.

Audio really depends on your situation. If your motherboard’s builtin audio card is in the same IOMMU group as your dGPU, you’re fucked and you’ll need a USB DAC. That shouldn’t be the case though, it’s usually in your iGPU’s group.

Now for the hardware. From the above, you’ll need:

• 2 GPUs (1 for linux, 1 for windows)
• Mainboard firmware that supports IOMMU
• Audio NOT in the same IOMMU group as the windows GPU
• AMD/Intel GPU for linux, NVIDIA for windows as recommended by Looking Glass. I’ve personally had success with Intel for windows as well though.
• Your display must be connected to the linux GPU.

I’ve heard nvidia power management is a shitshow for laptops, I know someone that couldn’t get rtd3 power management to work on their 3000 series laptop gpu. that was on arch though, im not sure if Ubuntu has something set up already to handle that

purism librem 5 seems to have everything working https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Purism_Librem5_(purism-librem5)

first 3 I wouldn’t recommend to a newcomer, and aren’t support things like this mainly oriented towards enterprise and not consumers?

you can probably also run bsd and 9front :)

Linux is a volunteer project (mostly). There is no “support” like a commercial os, you’ll have to figure out your way around it yourself.

There are Linux User Groups (LUGs) around the world though, which are volunteer groups that help people with their Linux problems. Have a look at if you can find one around you

shit they exist?? tysm!

how did you configure it? iirc vgpus in Linux are pretty bad, virgl is pretty good but it doesn’t have a guest driver for windows

or you can model functional mechanical parts with blender like some masochist (definitely not me)

it’s not that deep bro

wireless cards are really cheap on aliexpress and the ones I’ve bought have been actual genuine parts. I recommend getting something like a Intel AX210 for normal use, or a card supported by ath9k if you want to mess around with wifi stuff

I would personally buy a new ssd for Linux, and keep the original windows drive somewhere else for safe keeping. That’s what I did when I migrated

However, you can transfer the entire ssd content including files, partitions, boot stuff to another disk (e.g. your hdd) as long as that hdd is bigger than or the same size as your ssd. have a look at clonezilla for this. You can then read this hard drive’s contents from the new Linux install to copy over files you want.

debian’s netinstaller is great

have you actually tried it? trying mint after using arch for a year (btw), it’s actually really well made and the consistency is crazy good. The UI looks and feels better in person than in screenshots

wait huh?? it’s a twm for windows? i kinda want that (also damn it’s agpl)

why does it have to be webview though

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installing the proprietary driver isn’t too bad in my experience as long as you’re comfortable with your package manager.

It’s just that the drivers are simply bad (e.g. some filters in gamescope are borked, you can’t use vaapi for hardware video acceleration, etc). these issues exist on all distros because they’re all using the same proprietary drivers

I don’t think the nvidia-open kernel module works with nvk, it’s only compatible with the proprietary userspace driver

if you want to use nvk you have to use the nouveau kernel driver

that’s mainly because of Wayland’s security model I think, it’s trading a tiny bit of convenience for lots more security in terms of things like preventing easy keylogging.

You can still do keylogging in wayland but that has to be done at the compositor or evdev layer, which requires root access or control of the DE, which makes it more secure. I’m sure you could write something in C to do this though

It might be an annoyance for you and I get that, but your small annoyance improves security for lots more people than you realise. I’m sure you can adapt to not using the script though (I also use multiple layouts and I work fine without a script like this)