I by now have wasted far too much time trying to setup a VM on my decently decked out machine (i5 13600KF, RTX 3080, 32GB DDR5, Win11 on a 4K Display) to run some kind of Linux in there that runs perfectly smooth - mostly for Development purposes.
So far I have tried all 3 major vm hosting softwares for windows (VMWare, Hyper V and Virtual Box) along side various (admittedly beginner friendly) distros (Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, Mint, …) yet I have not once gotten a System up and running with smooth animations and no notable input latency. Also I have of course turned on Hardware virtualization in my bios and benchmarks usually show that CPU performance seems to be where I expect it.
So I wanna ask the community what setup they are using under windows that just runs any kind of Linux smoothly and what point I may be missing.
Also installing Linux natively is not really an option for me since I want to be able to run Multiplayer games and I still consider myself a Linux beginner and don’t wanna commit to install Linux directly on my host machine yet.
I suggest trying Windows Subsystem for Linux. You’ll get a simpler way to get familiar with the command line, which is the important part if you’re interested in development.
That or dual boot, you don’t need to set aside a large partition for messing around.
I respectfully disagree, as someone who’s tried both WSL1 and 2, I’d avoid it. Not only does it not replace the experience of a proper Linux install, you run into weird issues or quirks that’s caused by WSL, which is the last thing that someone new to Linux and trying to code at the same time, would want to experience. In my case, I had an issue with my Arch WSL2 install where the network would stop working for some weird reason. Tried a bunch of things, nothing worked, in the end I gave up on it because I wasted too much time on it, when I could’ve just used Hyper-V instead - which I did, and had no issues (which was also weird, considering WSL2 uses Hyper-V in the backend). Then the other weird issue was trying to clean up my broken WSL2 install - no matter what I did, I couldn’t get my Arch install out of the
wsl --list --alllist - even though it didn’t actually exist anywhere.And in case you ask, yes I did try other distros too, had the same issue with the network.
The whole experience left me with a bad taste in my mouth, like it was some unfinished beta product.
That’s odd! I had no issues with the stock Ubuntu install. Installing CUDA on a Windows machine requires WSL2 now, but I didn’t really use it for anything more than that, so I could’ve just not used it enough to find problems. As soon as I finished the semester that required proprietary software, I got rid of Windows entirely though.
IMO, as long as you get comfortable with the basics like navigating directories and moving files, installing and updating software (first through something like apt, compiling stuff manually isn’t necessary at first), and managing some basic bash settings like aliases, you’re pretty much set. At least, from a programmer’s standpoint.
I dunno how well versed OP is in computers overall is the thing. The above is a good baseline, but you need a general understanding of how operating systems work in general to be really comfortable with something like Arch. Like you gotta know what a driver is before you can troubleshoot issues with your hardware, or if you’re managing disks it’s good to have an idea of how filesystems work. But that all comes with experience.