I daily drove a Windows VM on Unraid for a solid 6 months. I did it because I’d wanted to try it out for a long time and after upgrading my server I finally had the resources to spare to try it out. Would I recommend it? Not for most people, especially if you intend to game on it. Most anything with fascistic anti-cheat will not run because it detects that it’s in a VM, so it really limits your options. Performance-wise, the games that did run ran pretty well. FO76 ran between 80-120 FPS at 4K with most settings maxed. Similar with Destiny 2. I didn’t do a lot of gaming during that time but those 2 titles were the most notable ones.
As for regular desktop use, most of the time I didn’t even think about the fact that I was on a VM. There was a weird issue that affected only YouTube in Chrome where pages would load but most of the elements on the page would take 5-30 seconds to fully pop in. I tried it on several browsers and it had the same issue. That was really the only notable issue I had though.
In summary, I’m glad I did it because it was something that I really wanted to try because virtualization in general I just find super interesting. If it’s something that similarly interests you a lot and you like tinkering, then go for it just to get it out of your system. I’m glad to be back on bare-metal for my daily driver PC though.
For reference, my Unraid server consisted of a 7950x (16-core), RTX 3090 (now relocated to my daily PC), and 64GB RAM. I allocated 6 cores (isolated from the host), 24GB RAM, and the 3090 passed through to the gaming VM. Also had a USB controller passed through. For storage I used a vdisk on an NVMe drive. Intended to pass through an NVMe drive but never got around to it.
As of this week I’m giving Pop OS a try (coming from Windows 11) and this will be my 4th or 5th attempt at switching to Linux but I’ve always been driven off by odd issues that have no (clear) resolution or just general weirdness like bad performance even when just using a web browser. I was having a terrible time with high resource usage just sitting at the desktop, Firefox being sluggish, the entire DE freaking out for no reason, etc. and I kinda just came to accept that that’s how it is with an Nvidia card.
I switched Pop OS to Wayland since there’s a toggle for it right on the login screen and suddenly everything is fine. Buttery smooth experience so far in terms of performance. Very little time spent playing games on it so far, but in my experience thus far it’s been better on Wayland. In X I booted up a game just to test and it put the game on a secondary monitor, upside down, and completely unresponsive to inputs. It also scrambled all of my windows and made my resolution weird and took a while for it to recover after force quitting the game.
In Wayland, the same game booted up with no issues, Windows-like performance, and it didn’t mess up everything else. That was AimLab which I use for testing since it’s a smallish download.
Second test was with Halo Infinite. Wouldn’t even run under X. Tried different proton versions but nothing worked. Under Wayland it booted up and ran. The campaign worked but I was having odd issues where it was kinda like having really bad ping in a multiplayer game where you rubber band backward and forward. Or like it was showing old frames mixed in with new frames. Low performance, about 55fps when under windows it’s 90-100. Still, better than X and could probably be improved with further tinkering.
Ramble aside, it seems like Wayland with an Nvidia GPU is going well for me so far. I’m really not familiar with the technical aspects of Wayland vs X, but from an end-user perspective, I’m liking what I see so far.