Going to use Arch on a VM, which should I use?

Yoru@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 33 points –

I want to get into Arch Linux, but I don't have that much experience and I feel like it'll be easier to set it up in a virtual machine rathen than dual booting, I've used Oracle VirtualBox before but it's very laggy. Are there any other VMs that aren't as laggy, or do I just have a hardware issue?

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Desktop usage is almost always going to feel laggy in a VM because you don't have a real GPU inside the VM and it will fallback to some non-accelerated framebuffer mode. There are some GPU virtualization solutions, for example QEMU has virgl that offers 3D acceleration, but in my experience it's buggy/not ready and doesn't offer near bare metal performance.

The only way to get near bare metal graphical performance in a VM is by using PCI pass through of an entire GPU, but that requires an extra GPU, is non-trivial to setup and comes with a lot of caveats.

VM has an option to enable GPU acceleration iirc, would that solve it?

Probably not. There are no implementations that I'm aware of that work well on a Linux guest.

Don't worry, if he installs Arch from scratch, it will take him a long time before even having internet connection or installing X.

That's just a meme. If you can follow some basic instructions, you can setup arch.

This. There's archinstall now, too. A bit buggy in my experience so I prefer the old fashioned way.

Dunno why are people spreading this myth... Arch is not that hard to install and you don't get a gold medal for installing it. I installed it with LXDE in an office machine, it only took me an hour.

It depends, I installed it from base, text mode, I had to edit some config file to add my network interface and systemctl restart network etc, then pacman to install X, Xfce, etc, by hand. I guess the best thing is to install Manjaro for instance, it takes a few minutes and you have full GUI and everything.