I installed Windows 10 (not even 11!) recently on a random laptop and was appalled by the amount of BS in the initial setup process. Forced me to make a Microsoft online account seemingly with remote access to my PC, tried to sign me up for several different free trials, then tried multiple times to push me to Edge instead of Chrome. The UI has new crap like the Bing search on the taskbar and in the center of the des…
Is pass-through good enough on modern hardware where I can just run a windows VM for gaming and then shutdown windows when I'm done? This would be the ideal scenario for me. I applaud Valve's efforts with proton, but I think Microsoft will start pushing back. I bet starfield will be very difficult to run well in Linux, for example.
if you want to do this, there are a couple of gotchas. One i'd recommend bearing in mind is not using identical cards. Either two vendors or two different types of cards (like a 1060 and a 1070). This makes it easier to stub the windows card and also write/edit the scripts (which are probably searchable on goog with "vfio-bind").
The second is one that i lost the information about, but if it affects you, it should be possible to dig up the info. Some games get micro-stuttering or stuttering when running with vfio under qemu; the fix can be an application that applies settings on windows or editing the windows registry.
All that aside, it works fine. The audio latency is minimal, but if you have a machine with more than 24 PCIe lanes, you can just dedicate an entire USB PCI card to windows, passing that through and plugging all the windows related hardware through that.
I think Linus (LTT) mentioned doing something like this, virtualizing even multiple windows machines on a single machine with the threadripper (32-64 lanes) and Epyc (64, 96, or 128 lanes) - having a dedicated USB and GPU for each virtualized desktop. Nice.