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.
If you’re a gamer, you might be interested in switching to Bazzite - it’s arguably one of the best distros for gaming right now, so you won’t need to use Windows for the most part (unless you’ve got one of those games which employ invasive (rootkit type) anti-cheat systems - but those wouldn’t let you game in a VM in the first place).
Also, 8GB RAM is a bit on the lower side these days for gaming, if I were you, I’d try to upgrade to at least 16GB, if that’s possible. But it shouldn’t be an issue for older games though.