What is it and why I need it?
As I am an engineering student, I frequently need software, that is available only on Windows. That said, I prefer Linux. An interesting clash of wants and needs, right?
I had two options. Either I use dual-boot or I spin up a virtual machine (or VM for short), give it a lot of resources and call it a day. There was also an option to use remote access, but it didn’t make sense in my case.
After trying out dual-boot and realising, it is annoying as hell to change between two OSes, I tried creating a VM. After doing some magic with GPU passthrough and setting special stuff here and there, I managed to get a pretty performant virtual Windows install.
Setup
I used virt-manager to get a nice GUI interface, and just went from there. Make sure to give it loads of memory and CPUs. Ideally, you would give it a whole physical drive, but as that is not always possible, I opted for a virtual one with virtio drivers.
GPU
I mentioned GPU passthrough. This is a bit different on every machine, distro and GPU, so I’ll just need to research it again next time I need it.