Windows 10 1803 the best yet...

Tony1044

Prolific Poster
Ah right.

I've never run VMware workstation for Linux (although I have on top of Windows) but I believe it supports GPU passthrough.

Although that might still be pants and to be fair, given you saying you need every drop of performance, even with passthrough, the rest of the virtualisation layer would likely introduce delays that aren't acceptable.

I dual boot some systems between Windows and Linux but most of what I do/need is in Windows and often the utilities I need for work simply don't work well virtualised (occasionally not at all) so I feel the pain
 

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
In fairness I've not tried it, but I suspect the above to be the case strongly enough to conclude it doesn't warrant the effort of trying. Sacrificing an afternoon here or a day there to handle Windows Upgrade related issues is overall a smaller waste of time. Or until I can get sufficiently upgraded hardware that any performance hit can be adequately absorbed.

I've not looked at it, but I wonder if VRR technologies work with GPU passthrough? A quick google says it might...
 

Tony1044

Prolific Poster
In fairness I've not tried it, but I suspect the above to be the case strongly enough to conclude it doesn't warrant the effort of trying. Sacrificing an afternoon here or a day there to handle Windows Upgrade related issues is overall a smaller waste of time. Or until I can get sufficiently upgraded hardware that any performance hit can be adequately absorbed.

I've not looked at it, but I wonder if VRR technologies work with GPU passthrough? A quick google says it might...

I am not a huge gamer and other than the occasional new title that catches my eye I tend to play things like Portal 2 and user-created levels so not taxing at all, but I'd be intrigued by it.

You might be interested to know that MS have started to streamline the way they do updates - you've probably noticed these days that most updates are all cumulative update - CU - patches that are single, big patches that include all the last months' worth of patches and hotfixes.

Where companies are using WSUS - the solution that allows administrators to download patches once to a central server then roll them out in a more controlled fashion - the WSUS server downloads the full CU but then clients only get the bits they need.

This seems to not only make the monthly please wait cycle much faster, but less prone to breaking things.

Be interesting to see when/if they roll it out en masse. Might make your life a bit easier.
 

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
Portal 2 is actually released for Linux I believe, so no Wine / VM etc required(?)

The periodic updates don't seem to be an issue for me in general. In principle we'd probably prefer more, smaller updates than fewer larger ones due to what these days is a "slow" internet connection. But our internet connection being rendered unusable for longer periods due to the download is ultimately a lot easier to work around than periodic games of "X isn't working any more, what do I need to update/revert to fix it?". Especially as that game itself usually requires downloads anyway.

The problems we get aren't with updates but with the biannual upgrades. Even left to mature for a few months after they are available, they still like to perform a Drive-style elevator head stomping on the system. With the user left feeling like Carey Mulligan's character backing out of the lift away from Microsoft in its bloodied scorpion jacket.
 
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Tony1044

Prolific Poster
Yeah I don't understand the whole concept of updating an OS every six months for what, ultimately, seems just to be the sake of it.

Since the advent of Win 10, I would struggle to think of a single killer-feature that would have compelled me to actually do the update.

And it's catching - I've just architected an entire Citrix solution for a well-known retailer. They're jumping up from ancient versions (XP, Vista, 2003) to modern, up-to-date.

Now the last thing you want to do is upgrade a Citrix solution every 6 months, but unless you go onto their 'LTSR' (Long Term Service Release) this is exactly what you end up doing.

Which is absolutely madness. In the extreme.
 

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
As a plain old end-user, the randomware protection seems appealing. So the thing that was finally released with 1803.

I've seen other people use the game DVR feature I guess, but had it not been available they'd have used something else that was also free. And I suppose Malwarebytes and other software has ransomware protection.
 

fnf

Silver Level Poster
In fairness I've not tried it, but I suspect the above to be the case strongly enough to conclude it doesn't warrant the effort of trying. Sacrificing an afternoon here or a day there to handle Windows Upgrade related issues is overall a smaller waste of time. Or until I can get sufficiently upgraded hardware that any performance hit can be adequately absorbed.

I've not looked at it, but I wonder if VRR technologies work with GPU passthrough? A quick google says it might...

All PCI & USB hardware will work, the problem is that PCI passthrough (and VGA passthrough in particular) is not as stable as it should be. One would like to think that a bug in the virtualised OS or a defect in the passed-through hardware won't affect the rest of the host system but that is not the case.

I did spend about a month using a Windows VM with an AMD GPU passed-through using KVM. It worked well and for the most part I could not tell that I was running a virtualised OS. Unfortunately it resulted in system crashes roughly every week of uptime (the crashes were invariably having to do with the GPU). Considering my typical uptime of 4-6 months, it wasn't really acceptable.

I reluctantly moved back to using Windows VM but it was quite painful when doing anything graphically intensive (mainly Photoshop & Premiere Pro). I decided to move back to Windows when I realised Linux was starting to hinder my productivity (none of it was its fault but it changes little).

So as a long-time Linux user, I have to say it is still not there yet. Windows has its own stability issues and it remains to be seen for me whether I can keep it running for as long as I used Linux (same installation for over 7 years).
 
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