2024 will be the year I finally be the year I ditch windows.
I am not exactly new to linux, yet I am far from an expert. I made my journey over the years form trying Ubuntu (many many major revisions ago) and have found myself down the rabbit hole of going Arch. I run Arch with KDE on my laptop. I want to fully ditch Windows on my desktop, however I feel this will be a much bigger hurdle to overcome.
Build Specs: i7-12700KF Copper Modded EVGA RTX 3090 64gb of 3600mhz DDR4 ASUS Tuf Z690 Wifi D4
I could go into more detail about my specs, but the specs aren't what has made this journey a bit tougher. I use a Line 6 Helix and a Line 6 PowerCab 112+ and both have usb connections to my computer for integration with, you guessed it; windows or mac software only. Now I don't have a problem running wine, and a number of other solutions to run windows programs, I do however have a gap in knowledge in order to try to use these specific programs with specific USB peripherals.
Now, I am not sure if this is the best way, but I had heard the idea of USB passthrough. And I have no clue where to begin with that. Would this be the direction I should be going for programs such as those?
The only other software that I am going to struggle replacing is the RGB lighting software for all of my hardware. Most of it is corsair (Fans, RAM, Water Cooler, and plugins for the asus motherboard.) And my Steeleseries keyboard which uses GG.
I have looked into using OpenRGB but I was unable to figure out how to get those setup as it wasn't as plug and play as the manufacturer software, but understandably of course.
The absolute biggest hurdles is my Nvidia problem. I have always had issues with Nvidia on Arch. I would gladly take an suggestion. For reference, I would be using this mainly for my gaming. I occasionally dabble in Stable Diffusion.
I will be running Arch with KDE preferably, but every single time I have had issues.
I suppose any feedback anyone may have would be helpful.
Checklist of things I need to get working on in Arch, any help would be welcomed:
- Helix Guitar pedal and PowerCab 112+ (USB Passthrough or any other alternatives people may suggest)
- RGB for SteeleSeries Apex Pro (GG software on windows, open to alternatives)
- RGB for Corsair (iQue on windows, open to alternatives)
- Nvidia Drivers
I believe that both VirtualBox and KVM (QEMU) can do USB passthrough. With either one you can have the full Windows OS running on your Linux desktop, which could be more comfortable than going for WINE. Here's an example with KVM and Arch Linux.
Thank you for the suggestion! I will look into this.
KVM has been my go-to for many years of running servers because it is extremely lightweight. Like for example, last year I finally ditched the old poweredge 860 servers (very early 2000's machines which topped out with a dual-core CPU and 8GB of memory), however from these servers I was running half a dozen virtual linux boxes handling websites and email. Of course running a Windows vm is going to take a lot more resources but any desktop computer that is less than a decade old would easily handle it while still managing your regular linux desktop.
One caveat about KVM, however, is that there's not really a great GUI interface for it. There IS a monitor to manage the VMs you have up and running, but I always launch new VMs from the command line, which is pretty much just a matter of setting the name and memory, pointing it to an existing image file or ISO, and then using the GUI monitor to launch a VNC remote connection to handle getting a new OS installed or make changes to an existing image to get it on the network. I don't consider this a burden, but then again I grew up on the command line.
I haven't explored KVM as an option. Yet, but I am going to be investigating that for my own use case now.
Outside of my laptop and desktop, I did run a Dell PowerEdge (forget the model, but I have a singular Xeon and 64gb of ram in it along with hardware based raid and 8 hdd bays.) that I ran Ubuntu on, but I realized Ubuntu wasn't the way to go for me due a number of things. So I shut the server down and will be reinstalling another OS on, I haven't decided yet but maybe Fedora for that. It was just being used to run Docker and Portainer, which I had a good chunk of docker containers running. I had a reverse proxy, Jellyfin, Gluetun, uptime kuma, signal messaging bot for uptime kuma to let me know if a services went down, photoprism, kanboard, a wiki, and a few other services.
I used to run Ubuntu on my servers but abandoned it because it was so unreliable. Things like a "security" update that completely broke the network card drivers, or another one that caused NFS connections to reboot the machine under a heavy load. I switched over to Debian at that point and have never had any problems in the past decade. Since so many people run Arch, I'm guessing it is similarly stable and will be a good choice for you (at least I think you said you were running it in your OP?). I'll have to look through those services you mentioned, I haven't heard of most of them.
Well for my poweredge server I ran Ubuntu on it, and my pis Raspbian. As far as desktop/laptop I use Arch, not for stability though it has been stable for my use case but more so for a bleeding edge up to date experience.
As far as the services I ran, they were for media consumption, and some other network tools.
You can passthrough your Rtx 3090 into Qemu to achieve hardware acceleration. With software called 'Looking Glass' you'll get a hardware accelerated Qemu/kvm window instead of sacrificing your second monitor or using a kvm switch.
Level1Linux has made a brilliant videos about Looking Glass.
You should also passthrough a ssd/nvme disk into your Qemu.
Thank you so much for the suggestionsm I absolutely will be investigating this.