Half of these exist because I was bored once.
The Windows 10 and MacOS ones are GPU passthrough enabled and what I occasionally use if I have to use a Windows or Mac application. Windows 7 is also GPU enabled, but is more a nostalgia thing than anything.
I think my PopOS VM was originally installed for fun, but I used it along with my Arch Linux, Debian 12 and Testing (I run Testing on host, but I wanted a fresh environment and was too lazy to spin up a Docker or chroot), Ubuntu 23.10 and Fedora to test various software builds and bugs, as I don’t like touching normal Ubuntu unless I must.
The Windows Server 2022 one is one I recently spun up to mess with Windows Docker Containers (I have to port an app to Windows, and was looking at that for CI). That all become moot when I found out Github’s CI doesn’t support Windows Docker containers despite supporting Windows runners (The organization I’m doing it for uses Github, so I have to use it).
You can say: “I use Arch, Fedora, Windows, MacOS, Gentoo, LFS, Debian, PopOS, and more, btw.”
linux users are sane?
Users are sane?
Mutahar please log in to your main account
With that many Windows (gasp) ones, no… I’m afraid you are not
*sane
*some
*lame
There are many many many insane people who are running no virtual machines at all.
I have about twice this many VMs and about this many running at any given time.
I use Qubes btw
What do you use it for? How’s the daily-driver experience?
Its my only computer. I couldn’t go back to anything else. Every time I double click Firefox, it opens a new VM. When I close Firefox, the VM is destroyed.
Email is in a separate VM. Email attachments also open in a disposable VM. USB devices are quarantined unless I connect them to a specific VM. Its a game changer.
Cons: I need as much ram as I used to need when I ran Windows. Watching videos is a bit choppy at full screen sometimes. And I can’t play any video games.
Sounds like some pretty serious cons
Out of curiosity why do you like qubes? Having everything in a VM doesn’t sound that great to me
I get that the main concern of it is security but what do you do that it demands that level of hardening? I’ve only ever got one virus in my life that I know of as it is and that was on windows
Lol wut? Those pros far outweigh the cons. But I guess I don’t care about video games?
I have money on my computer, and I have a company that has customer info. That’s enough of a reason for me to want to protect my shit better than running one big, super-vulnerable system
Not op but I do a lot of architecture and infrastructure work on top of my normal dev work so keeping everything separated and per-client has become a pretty important advantage for me personally
Yeah I also consult with many different clients. Sometimes those clients need me to install sketch software. Thank god I can do this in a silo in Qubes, or it could endanger my other clients.
Yep that I imagine is one of the main intended use cases, in my case would probably be overkill though
Fwiw I had to tinker a bit to get good video playback, Fedora was always choppy for me for some reason but debian is typically smooth with hw accel disabled.
As for the gaming, depending on your setup (I have a desktop and T480 I keep in sync) you can absolutely run two video cards and do PCI passthrough on one to a gaming VM. I have mine set up with a dedicated NIC and USB card and just use a KVM to swap between Qubes and Windows (for now) and it’s worked really well. Had to play around a ton to get the full speed out of the GPU though and it only seemed to work in windows so hopefully get that going for a Linux hvm one day.
Absolutely agree there is no going back, I have all of my work stuff entirely hardware agnostic and a full on replica of my work desktop ready to go in a moment should the desktop die. Apart from that keeping client work isolated has been such a game changer.
I use Debian. Like I said, video is only sometimes choppy. I usually have a few vlc windows open at one time. Something I’ve learned is that it will use a lot of CPU even if the video is paused. To stop it, I have to manually set the video source to “none” when I pause a video and leave it in the BG.
Or just pause the whole VM. Another great Qubes feature
Something I’ve learned is that it will use a lot of CPU even if the video is paused.
this has been my experience with it on windows too, so it must be a core VLC thing. if it bothers you, I recommend you to try out MPV. been using it for more than a year, would never go back. If you need more than the on screen controller and key combos, there are quite a few proper GUI players being built on MPV.
itd be bad as a daily driver imo
I had a VM but somehow the virtual drive got corrupted? And it wouldn’t let me install, update or uninstall VC++ runtime as a result. I’m gonna try again later, but it’s a worrying start.
That just sounds like classic Winsanity right there, not a hard drive issue.
not even sure distro tube has this many lmao
If I could get vbox to work* on my laptop or find the drive to learn QEMU, then I would have plenty on there. For now I’m just stuck with plenty on my desktop running win10.
*I have installed it a few times on my Debian based distro, but I swear every time I do nothing to it and it destroys itself. Works fine one day, then the next I turn on my laptop, after the only changes being that I created and ran a VM and it decided to hate me and not even boot the program. I think I’m just cursed.
What about Virt Manager GUI, which is what I use here? It’s a frontend for QEMU and it’s not that difficult, honestly.
GPU passthrough has always been one of those exciting ideas I’d love to dive into one day. My current GPU being a little older, has only 4GB of RAM. Oh the joy’s of being a budget PC user. Thankfully it’s more of a “would be nice rather” than an “actually need”…
I did this with Qubes a year ago and haven’t had any issues apart from figuring out the right flags to get the full performance, otherwise the GPU would cap around 30% under load with low CPU load.
Kind of at the mercy of what your motherboard and bios will allow, mine I had to cheese a little and disable the PCI device on boot so I get to decrypt my disk with no screen lol but it works!
My motherboard is a stock dell from around 2012 so I doubt performance would be at all good. Thats even if it worked in the first place…
Very few people need it but it’s awesome and a lot of fun and lets you spend more time in Linux than dealing with Windows. The VFIO Reddit and Arch wiki are great resources. I have GPU, USB, and Ethernet pass through on my Ubuntu machine and it works great, but I needed the Arch wiki to really figure out what I was doing wrong when I first set it up. Level1Techs is also a good resource on YouTube and forums because they are big into VFIO and SR-IOV. Next time you get a PC, make sure to look for more PCI lanes and bifurcation support on your motherboard. Gen 4 is a great option because it generally has enough lanes and the ram and ssd are much cheaper than Gen 5. GPU choice doesnt matter much but if you’ve got AMD watch out for the reset bug. Basically you can start a VM but once you quit it the cards state is unavailable for further use (eg a second VM session or reopening your DE if you’re using a single GPU setup) unless you restart your host. There are some workarounds but personally I’d avoid it if possible. Onboard graphics (iris or amd APU) are recommended. Older hardware can get cheap so good luck saving up if this is something you want to do!
I run a different LXC on Proxmox for every service, so it’s a bunch. Probably a better way to do it since most of those just run a docker container inside them.
Why mix docker and VMs? Isn’t docker sort of like a VM, an application-level VM maybe? (I obviously do not understand Docker well)
Serious answer, I’m not sure why someone would run a VM to run just a container inside the VM, aside from the VM providing volumes (directories) to the VM. That said, VMs are perfectly capable of running containers, and can run multiple containers without issue. For work, our Gitlab instance has runners that are VMs that just run containers.
Fun answer, have you heard of Docker in Docker?
I like to run a hypervisor host as just that, a hypervisor host. The host being stable is important, and also reduce attack surface by only having it as that.
An LXC per service is somewhat overkill. A docker host running on LXC could likely run all the docker containers.
I always remove any virtual machines every time I’m done with it and reinstall if I need to use it again
Interesting enough, there is a project that I’ve found that runs Windows in a Docker container as a VM.
https://github.com/dockur/windows
I run a Windows 10 LTSC that way to run things like Blue Iris for my security cameras, and some stuff to track my solar installation.
Sounds nice, how useable is it?
runs Blue Iris and I can rdp into it over a cellular modem fine. And its running on an ancient i3
I’ve had physical esx servers running this many VMS simultaneously, and I can totally see why a hobbiest or dev would have a need for this many VMs on standby. You are sane, yes
