Welp, it’s finally happened. Windows 10 has become so bloated, slow, and spooky that I finally have decided to bite the bullet and set up a VM on my linux Mint partition. Do you have any suggestions for a virtual machine? My PC is a relatively basic mid-range business laptop, 8gb of ram, no GPU, only a few years old. I’m a little concerned about performance impact, as I’ve heard that VMs take more system resources than the OS running natively. Any recommendations of software/configurations that would work best for me?
EDIT for clarity: The games i intend to run are, largely, older non-steam games. i obviously just use proton for all my steam games, but some weird older ones don’t have a steam release/i don’t have the steam version.
flatpak install bottles pupgui -y
In ProtonUp download the latest Proton-GE (the Steam Proton doesnt work reliably outside of steam, the Glorious eggroll version does) and install in Bottles.
In Bottles create a new Gaming Bottle, install your Games there and see what runs.
After that, for the not running games, I think using a second drive (avoid dualbooting like hell!) with a debloated windows 11 should be best. Using WinUtil from christitus, and BulkCrapUninstaller you can make windows tolerable.
Also using Rufus on Windows you can and should create a Win11 USB stick that has ms account, telemitry and (if you need it) hardware requirement checks disabled.
