I have a nice dual boot win10-manjaro conf in my 250 gb SSD. So nice I never use it.
I end up using Windows most of the time.
It’s been I while since I wanted to try a VM and judging by the few thread discussing the topic a good choice for a VM is VirtualBox, therefore I think I’ll start with that. I have a basic understanding but no experience on VMs.
Ideally I’d want to imaging the whole phisical partition containing windows and mount it in the VM on Manjaro, is that possible?
Unless you set up qemu/kvm virtualization with GPU passthrough - which i’m trying to do now and finding out is a huge challange - you’re not going to have a good performance in a VM. Especially in Virtualbox.
VMs like virtualbox are for testing stuff in an isolated environment, nothing graphically or processor intensive though. It does work, but for comparison, i couldn’t get Affinity Photo (which is like Photoshop) to run stable on Virtualbox.
And making it run good requires 2 GPUs (one for the host, one for the guest) for starters, and a LOT of reading up on documentation.
Setting up a VM in Virtualbox is super easy, and will allow you to use Office, Mail, internet, maybe youtube, but anything that requires graphics card drivers won’t work.
So ask yourself what you plan on doing on the host machine, and what do you need a virtual machine for.
You can definitely test it out with Virtualbox, setting up a VM with Virtualbox is not that hard, just don’t expect too much out of the performance.
Ideally I’d want to imaging the whole phisical partition containing windows and mount it in the VM on Manjaro, is that possible?
I haven’t tried, but it seems you can
Beware the warning:
Warning: Do not attempt to mount or boot the partition that runs the host OS with a VM, as that can lead to severe data corruption. And no matter which drive or partition you want to mount, it’s always a good idea to back up any existing data on it before continuing.
And as other said, you probably wont get the best performances unless you learn how to passthrough your gpu in your vm, you can search for more if you type “vfio pass-through pc, laptod”
I use it for petty stuff emails, browsing, etc. All things I can do with Manjaro. Being in a Linux environment also keeps me engaged with terminal and stuff, it’s a good training. Other reasons are reliability, privacy, etc. There are a few programs still I feel more comfortable with Windows some necessary for my country.
I haven’t even got a GPU. I’m running on motherboard graphics, will that be overkill?
Yeah, just using Win for daily use, nothing too extreme - maybe some PS, but I am not expecting to run it on a VM.
It could be an option. I could place an image of the original drive somewhere else and play with it. It sounds so easy put here in words but I know it will drive me crazy.
I am not that ambitious. I wonder whether it will run at all without GPU…
It’s says
is fairly easy to do with the GUI of VMware and Hyper-V when configuring a VM, that isn’t the case with creating a VirtualBox physical disk
If I understood correctly unlike VirtualBox VMware is not directly supported on Manjaro but still kinda cross-platform so it is possible to set is up in a okay way on Manjaro as well, right?
A good software for imaging partitions and backups? Also imaging the used portion of the partition and not the empty space to save space.
Not sure what that means, but:
have you seen this or this
or similar stuff?
Perhaps even on the Arch wiki (I don’t know whether there are such examples on there).
My Google search terms where:
virtualbox windows clone install
It seems pretty straightforward - just not easy for someone not used to use command line tools
which is what I meant with my remark.
Well, Virtualbox will run on onboard graphics. Virtualbox can’t map more than 256 or 512 (forgot) MB of video memory to the virtual machine anyway. So it will run like it will run i guess.
For proper high performance KVM virtualization, you need a physical PCIE GPU installed. You can run the host (Manjaro) on the onboard graphics, or share it, but you’ll get about the same performance as in Virtualbox.
For day to day stuff, why not just use Manjaro if you’re already planning on running WIndows in manjaro? It’s more than capable of being a great desktop, just use it. You don’t need Windows to browse the internet.
Anyway, don’t be discouraged, like i said, it’s not super hard to set up a VM in Virtualbox, and you can always try it, see how it runs. I doubt photoshop will run good in it though…
