Erm... why not Wine instead? I think you're asking for trouble if you wanna play 3D hardware accelerated games or SDK in a VM...

I used Wine once to runs some really old windows program with not much demand for graphics for playing chess online, blitzin, even there were occasional errors ...
I am only taking the real thing ... 100 % full virtualization ...
just because it's linux/free/open source doesn't mean I have ignore all the little errors ... I want something that works 100 %, I don't want any occasional errors ... it should just work like some super nintendo roms on zsnes ....

Even with a VM it won't be exactly the same thing because :
1. It doesn't have full control on the hardware. This point specifically (graphic cards) can be problematic. Maybe things changed in the last few years though, I don't know.
2. There's an additional layer which can surely add some latency. You have a whole OS to run on top of your windows application.

Anyway, good luck.

afaik wine has more "control" than a vm in the case of games and just because you used wine years ago doesn't mean it hasn't improved since then.

btw, wine is not an emulator... your comparison to playing snes games doesn't make sense. i'm not really sure you understand what you are trying to do here :\

If you want to run games on Linux, Wine (or one of its commercial derivatives) is the way to go. Check WineHQ's AppDB to find if the game or app you want to run is supported and instructions on how to install and configure it.

doesn't seem likely, only out of 4 passed, but thx for the tip

Afaik xen has gpu passthrough. I haven't tested it myself. It's not that simple to set up but I've heard that results are awesome. You should test it yourself and share the results.

I sometimes run some linux live cds through qemu and it's very fast even though I give them only 1gb ram and don't use gpu passthrough.

Make sure that you have all virtualization cpu features enabled in bios.

gotta check out xen, but I think it's not as popular as virtualbox/vmware

Maybe on Windows.
On linux kvm/xen are certainly more popular. Open development, GPL and no comercial addons are the reasons I guess.

edit: At least among personal users.

Besides vmware isn't for free and virtualbox doesn't have vga passthrough (I've heard that some cards work with simple PCI passthrough though).

why would you use a vm for gaming? :( either dual boot for the games you want to play in win or (better) use wine.

Wine doesn't support all the applications ...
Dual Boot is no option for me anymore ...
you just configure your 2nd os and after you have done everything to use it you just let it rot, because you use only your first os where all the applications are that you need ...
If I dual boot windows, I will stay with windows ...
I once had a mac and had windows applications running in parallels virtualization and that worked fine ...
os x is nice, you have the best of both worlds, unix and multimedia ....
if the macs weren't just so overpriced ... the mac mini and the laptops just suck and the mac pro is totally overpriced ... thought about hackintosh, but don't know of the compliance of my mainboard and the gfx card is ati and probably not supported

which apps are not supported by wine? take a look at winehq.com, lots of helpful advice there.

i agree on dual booting, it's useless and would've made me stay at win aswell.

You will still have 2 os if you use virtualization.
I have tiny win xp partition for ql only (because of some problems I can't resolve) and this works well for me. I'm on windows only when I actually play.

Every other windows game I played works in wine.

but linux will be my main os, which is way better for me :-),
because I will actually use it then. With Dual Boot you just stay in your windows environment.
I once had Parallels Virtualization for Os X ... and I just used it to run certain applications, and never used the os itself to start other applications within it ...

I built 4 hackintoshes so far and all but run on ati cards, that shouldn't be a problem (acutally the one that has an nvidia graphics cards makes mac os crash when connecting or disconnecting a display).

You have to look up potential problems with your mainboard, gigabyte mainboards usually have the best support.

I wouldn't buy an apple product ever again. I like their software but their hardware build quality is utter crap! I know from personal experience and because I work in IT and a lot of our customers have huge quality problems with their apple products. If you want mac os and don't need a laptop, building a hackintosh is the way to go IMO.

Even if you have mac os you will probably still end up having a dual boot because mouse input on osx is fucked beyond belief, QL is absolutely not playable and I wouldn't want to experience any game with keyboard/mouse input on osx although I did enjoy games that I've played with a xbox gamepad on mac os. This might also be a problem with virtualizing depending on how exactly vmware processes input

I honestly don't know what the problem with a dual boot is, SSDs are getting really affordable and boot times are less than half a minute.

I find Unity to run much better on osx (I wanted to try out win8 before installing mountain lion). Unity crashes regularly on windows 8 whereas things went smooth as butter on osx.

Also something that might be an important thing to know if you don't already is that mac os has an option to open every app that has been running when you shut it down on the next boot, so basically rebooting into osx is a bit like closing your vm after you're done playing

that's good news.
I actually have a gigabyte mainboard ... and an ati graphics card 6870 or something ... I will definitely try it out ...

I don't know about the mouse input problem, but I think I would only use os x natively ...

would be really nice if I could get the graphics card and my sound card could working on os x with the best drivers

I also have a radeon 68xx in my pc, it should work fine.

do you have an extra sound card? not sure about those, I have gotten every onboard soundcard to work after playing around some with kernel extensions though.

what do you mean by using osx natively? if you want to run the mac native QL do yourself a favor and don't even try, the plugin is bugged beyond belief and you won't get any more than an unstable 80-90fps on any hardware.

A lot of the newer games see mac releases though and even if they don't get a native osx release some studios or other people release wineskins which are basically a program specific wine executable which run pretty well.

good luck! :)

you just configure your 2nd os and after you have done everything to use it you just let it rot, because you use only your first os where all the applications are that you need ...
If I dual boot windows, I will stay with windows ...

Then you should just use Windows...

Performance for gaming would be terrible.

There are some pretty good layers for gaming though, the last time I tried to switch over I was playing c&c3, which I got working under wine, and performance was very good. However, the time spent getting it working probably wasn't worth it.

I have had better success using Cedega, where you can install a game like you would in windows, but only certain games are supported and they need to run in dx9 mode, but I think I only tried some older games and stuff. Can't remember.

For photoshop, try Photoshop 7 in wine. It runs very well.

Honestly though, if you want to do dev in Linux, just build 2 machines and use a kvm switch. Will cost more, but it cost will cover the amount of time you are going to spend trying to get games to run. I've given up, rather trying to make windows more like linux rather than the other way round.

I tried Quake Live in a VM when it was still closed beta and didn't have a native client, but it's plain rubbish and not usable. I tried it with Virtualbox. What games will you be playing?

I played Starcraft 2 on Linux with Play On Linux on my 6 year old dualcore laptop. It's another layer between you and the game that pulls in the best Wine version and scripts to run your game. It also handles the game installation. I can certainly recommend this. All the Wine versions are isolated. This works very well and performance is good.

Photoshop CS5 and Dreamweaver CS3 work flawlessly in Virtualbox.

Unity is native now, isn't it?
I do my development in Monodevelop (for C# Mono and Gtk# apps). Slowly working on my streaming software for Linux. I've got basic functionality going and I'm using the same principle as FFsplit.

In general terms of performance, I'm really liking Gnome 3, but it's a composited desktop, which means it impacts your performance. See it like Windows Aero. The only difference is that it doesn't "turn off" when you are gaming. I'd say Xfce is a very good (and also standard) desktop environment similar to Gnome 2, but it's a lot faster than Gnome 3.

TL;DR
Xfce for performance
Play On Linux for games
Virtualbox is ok for some Windows software

[+] for everything, but use cinnamon instead of gnome 3 cuz that's the devil ...or rather unity is, but gnome still makes me rage.

I believe ya that Photoshop runs fine ...

unity only has export for linux, runs only on win or mac os ...
although its based on the open source Mono project I believe ...

I guess its just best to try it out myself, since there doesnt seem to be so much data available ... but there are some vids online showing games played via xen virtualization ... it could work out!

http://michaelmk.blogspot.se/2012/06/gaming-o...a-xen.html

this guy uses two graphic cards, although it might be possible to pass through the primary one without too much loss.

http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_VGA_Passthrough

"Xen 4.0.0 supports VGA passthrough of the primary graphics adapter (the one that gets initialized and is used when you power-on the computer) only. VGA passthrough of secondary graphics adapters currently requires additional extra patches to Xen. "

if everything works out as in the video I would be so happy :-)

VMs were not designed with good graphical support in mind. Last time I checked all solutions offered a very limited quantity of video memory for your virtual apps.
Also the increased security that vms offer in my opinion is just a rumor, because what vms basically do, if you do not set strong security there, is that they offer better way for malicious code to access the memory of your computer. I did not study this in much detail, but from what I know giving the various code the possibility to access the resources of your computer easier, however virtual this operation might look, is not good.

I knew a person that tried the switch to linux..... ended up switching back


there are so few reasons to switch to linux and even more reasons not to do it.......

I personally would not recommend switching your main box to linux, if you need to be in linux get a lappy or a second box

I knew a person who knew a person that tried the switch to windows..... Haven't heard of him since anymore. Hope he is ok :-(

Was he switching from consoles?

yeah, u r right,
actually I decided to use win7 on my main desktop machine,
and on my laptop I installed debian linux wheezy rc1 ... first I tried FreeBSD, but it didn't come with any configured XServer or desktop manager and no sound configured and no mouse somehow and I just didn't want to into all this configuration shit (again) ... debian linux almost functions like a charm out of the box ... just needed to install non-free package for wifi and some small edits in sources.list and hosts file and voila everything's working, apt-get installs everything smoothly, have now set it up with gnome 3 and also run one windows applications in wine ... but linux already crashed, i.e. desktop freezed, one time and in zsnes it doesn't recognize the down right button of the xbox 360 pad, but it does recognize the normal r button, but the down r button is much more ergonomic ... win7 didn't crash and zsnes is working like it should, but I know that's not a problem of the os, but of the programs/drivers running on it ... though I don't think linux should crash, it should be able to catch some exception and report to the user and user should be able to continue working ...

If ctrl+alt+f1 and killing hung up process with sigkill doesn't work then it's something serious on kernel/driver level.
Kernel often can't "intercept" drivers' bugs because they have full hardware access. It's the same on windows (bsod) and every other os.

oh yeah, completely forgot about the ctrl+alt+f1 option,
thanks for the tip, I will try that out next time

you are right, it's about the drivers, it's not for all os the same though,
there exist also micro kernels for operating systems, there you can catch the exceptions, but there is no widespread microkernel system out there of any relevance for normal users

I don't know much about this stuff but I thought windows has had microkernel since nt?
Still driver has to work on a low level and can mess you up badly I think

ctrl+alt+f1 is a feature - on windows if desktop manager hangs your only option is hard reboot.