A friend is due for a gaming PC build. But he’s super pissed it needs to run windows 11. I told him just run something else. He said his job needs something that runs windows-only and on the odd occasions where he needs a desktop to do something he’s not buying a second computer just to run windows.
Dual booting exists but Microsoft likes to clobber boot loaders. So I reminded him he could just run windows 11 in a VM when he needs to, everything else in bare metal Linux.
He’s now sold on moving to Linux.
The question is where should he start? It used to be as simple as “if you aren’t sure, use Ubuntu.” But his use case kinda seems like what everyone has been crowing about using bazzite for.
I have zero experience with bazzite but the page does describe something built for his use case. There are 3 concerns I have though.
- Is it common enough that he can Google an answer?
- it’s an atomic distro, so classic Linux answers he might find online won’t always be applicable here.
- selinux, ugh.
What’s a good gamer Linux distro? He’s not super into tinkering. He just wants it to do the thing without Microsoft’s invasive bullshit.
With a tiny bit of offsec you can make pretty bulletproof setup.
Work only exists inside of a Win11 VM. It never touches the underlying system! All files associated with that VM (most importantly the virtual disk) live on a separate partition, or better separate drive. That partition is not mounted in fstab. So under normal circumstances it should never be mounted. So any fuck up they do to their Linux system will leave that partition untouched. If worst comes to worst that can boot a live iso from USB and run their work VM from there.
I would trust that setup infinitely more than having windows as a base system.