Working on my virtualization server...

My client's using some legacy server side software. I set it all up nice and isolated with proxmox, tunneled it through cloudflare, got the folks to do their install on a windows vm, passthrough their licensing usb. Hosted GLPI on it too (system inventory) and so on.

Wait for it. Windows Server refuses to accept local or domain passwords. WTF. Even went ahead and did a Utilman reset on it which lets you use an admin cmd prompt to the login screen where you could reset the password. Insane that it was even possible, but no good.

Client blamed linux for it, I switched over to Windows Server on baremetal. I setup Hyper-V thinking it should be just as capable as KVM.

Nope.

Guess what, you can't pass through usb for licensing (the legacy software). MOFOS DECIDED TO install it baremetal. I couldn't even get hyper-v to create a decent virtual network. It keeps changing all my network adapter settings. I COULDN'T EVEN PASSTHROUGH PCIE NETWORK CARDS.

This feels like an eternally stagnated, mossy soup of abandonware.

FUCK YOU WINDOWS. You've been sore pain the ass for EVERYONE.

On my personal journey to better privacy!

Wanted to change to Qubes, but since I wind down with games, that won't happen sadly and it seems windows still doesn't support proper gpu passthrough either, so might eventually change to linux host and windows guest or create a VM I use for everything else that isn't gaming, since I still really love the idea of having a snapshot backup system.

So since that isn't quite in my timeframe right now though: first move was to move to firefox, already done the change on mobile (love having dark reader and ublock on mobile!), now setting it all up on desktop, pleasant surprise was for sure that firefox finally seems to have chromes devtools pretty much mirrored, even the mobile suite of tools.

Loading of pages is also finally fast and much snappier than chrome from the first testing I could do (on desktop, on mobile it still kind of sucks in comparison, but I can deal with that).

Please suggest me all sort of privacy tools you got, especially with firefox in mind, but also host tools, be it windows or linux (e.g. some sort of traffic obfuscator that visits random pages that are SFW but make automatic traffic filtering hard, could probably make my own, but if there's something like that already, why not), I'll save all I can use.

I know I'm late to the party with GPU passthrough, but holy crap is it great! I first tried to set it up with an old GeForce 1050 ti, but damned if nvidia isn't completely worthy of that middle finger Linus gave them. I switched to an older Radeon(rx570) and it worked PERFECTLY. I have a fully accelerated windows desktop running as a VM now that I can connect to via parsec.

Big fan.

Finally dumped windows from my tower/gaming rig!!!

I'm now running Ubuntu Budgie and Windows 10 inside a qemu/kvm VM with gpu passthrough. That way I have almost-native performance and no additional setup effort for installing games.

Around a week ago I asked my mentor(lecturers friendly sidekick buddy 'o pal) if in iOS dev(the very next subject) I could virtualize, rent in cloud or run a hackintosh instead of buying a Mac. My mentor sounded enthusiastic and asked the lecturer of the next subject, who promptly said no, he did not support or recommend students who tried any of these approaches because in the past he had encountered students who have run into performance issues and we're unable to compile some things. Most likely those students were unable to setup GPU passthrough and whatnot.

However this is the exact point of a VM. It's exactly the same as if you had a real Mac. I believe this is just them being lazy. Tbh, this is an IT course they should be writing guides on how to do virtualisation, not preventing it.

Looks like I'm headed to the Apple store :(

Needed my Windows 10 vm for parallax propeller development again. Should be pretty straightforward:

Start VM. Very unresponsive and Interface glitches with 2GB RAM so I give it 4GB to get on the desktop. Bruh, off to a good start.

Turns out that there are a few updates. So I try to install them. After two fucking hours Virtualbox screams at me for being out of storage. FFS Window$ updates managed to take up like 20GB extra.

Had to install it from scratch since my drive is full. Now my key won't activate because it is already activated. 15min support hotline, because 6*8 characters are necessary for a f*cking Phone activation.

Damage assessment:
1h of my life I will never get back, a barely viable operating system and I'm not even sure if USB passthrough works.

PSA:Gnome-Boxen has a superb unattended installer.

Just needing to vent a bit...

We start off with classic asp.net & Xamarin. K.

Then we run into the shitshow that's lackluster documentation and heavy push for asp.net core.
Whatever, will just handroll things.

K. Azure is quickly turning expensive..
Well let's find alternatives.

Yeah, no Linux ain't gonna work.
Wanna shell out for a windows server? Nah.
K. Well, let's rewrite in asp.net core then.
Nginx proxy passthrough to kestrel. Ez.

Now.. wtf is the deal with mssql behaving like a turd on Linux?
Oh now some security jibber about telemetry and adding Microsoft keys to root.

Whatever. I can do PHP & MariaDB then.

1001 things wrong about Xamarin now.
Mostly performance related.
Especially cuz custom renderers for everything.
& Abused onPropertyChanged.

Uh la la, look at that sexy thing called react native.
Hippytyhop new tool for the job.

Ugh wee, what's this ? Customer impatient & deadline for months worth in Xamarin => 1 week.

Whelp I be fudge..

I hate dual boot, it might seem strange, but those 13 seconds it takes to shut down the pc, turn it on, select linux on grub (well, Windows broke my grub, so I actually have to use a modified version made to avoid windows 10 trying to make my computer "not mine") and type my password are the reason I'm starting to get lazy...
And there's more! The time between the on button press and the moment I can start working on linux is something between 3 and 4 seconds, not too much, and it takes less yhan 2 seconds to shutdown, it's not a problem, on the other hand, windows takes 20 seconds to boot, and after typing my account details, I have to wait almost 5 minutes before I can play (285 second onaverage)...
Sooooooo... Garbagedos is there only for games, I don't have any tool but notepad++ (hate it) and a lua ide for modding, I'd like to format everything and make a gpu passthrough, but I have an i5 quadcore, I don't know if that's enough 😥

!rant
My patch to a BBC Micro emulator to allow passthrough access to the host's IDE interface seems to work. Now I can try and program a BBC Micro to access CD-ROM drives 😃

Also, BrewDog order arriving tomorrow 🍺😃

Do we have vfio enthusiasts here?

Now that I made my second GPU boot into Arch Linux (inb4 I use arch, btw. jokes in the comments), I also set up a windows vm with GPU passthrough.

When I plug the monitor cable into the hdmi port of my passthrough'd GPU, I can see windows os on the screen.

My problem is that I want to have it inside of the same monitor without changing the from hdmi port to hdmi port manually, but "softwarely" (neologism ftw).

I read about looking-glass in the arch wiki (I use arch, btw. + On a serious side note though, I really like the arch wiki. It is very straightforward.), but I could not get it to synchronize with the Spice display server.

Does someone know how the solution to this problem?

Man i realy need to get of my windows host.
My productivity takes a nosedive whenever im on windows idk why.
I'd love to use linux fully but my fav game Overwatch has shit performance running on linux.
So the best solution would be to pass through my gpu to a windows vm for gaming.
But that would require a new gpu for the host system as the ryzen 7 1700 does not have a gpu.
I dont have any experience with passing thtough gpus. But could i make 2 vms that acces the same gpu, ofc not at the same time. So that i could have a gaming vm and maybe use another linux vm if i wanted to do something which profits off gpu acceleration.

Okay, so because my desktop has an APU (AMD A8-3850) and a dedicated GPU (AMD R9 380) in it, and i'm finally getting a (small, probably 240GB because budget) SSD for it, what Linux distro should I use? I'm planning on doing libvirt passthrough for Windows using my APU because fuck running it as a main anymore, it breaks too often. As far as I can tell, my options are as such, family-wise:

- Debian kernel: amdgpu doesn't like that I have an APU and GPU and refuses to see a screen (yes, even after all the Xorg configs and xrandr bullshit and kernel flags and...)

- RHEL: a lot of Red Hat-based distros (mainly Fedora) have packages that are broken out-of-repo and out-of-box recently, but maybe it'll like my hardware? (It's been a few Fedora releases since I last tried it, is this fixed? CentOS has such old packages that it's not even worth bothering with for my needs.)

- Arch kernel: go fuck yourself, i don't wanna take 1000 hours to get it running for a week, nor would the updates be any better than Windows' current problem (or even more so, as slightly more often than not Windows' broken updates just add annoyances and don't hose the system.)

did I miss any?

That Microshit motherfucker, Windows 10, is constantly messing up AMD drivers by "updating them out".

I did a clean reinstall, moved past the retarded Crimson installer hanging up on branding components, and configured everything. I had to reboot, and that little twat of an OS prompted me with "just a second, Windows is updating" reboot screen, after which the drivers are fucked up again. And that is the second time it has done that.

I just had to move my screen back out of my punching radius, otherwise I would probably had to buy a new one.

Linux with GPU passthrough seems to be the only sane option theesedays.

So one of my first rants was about me unable to setup Debian with (lightdm) Cinnamon to be working with optimus laptop and to make the damn hdmi port work, where the port is attached to the nvidia gpu (vga passthrough?)

I have to try it with another distro because the dual-booted Windows greatly feeds my procrastination. (Like ... Factorio, Stellaris, Rimworld and etc. type of procrastination, it's getting somewhat severe. )

So what would you people of devrant recommend me to try? I am thinking a lot about Arch but I am afraid there will be a lot more problems with the lenovo drivers for various things.

The next one is classical Ubuntu, at the end this distro looks like it's at least trying to work amongst other distro's.

Also thought about Fedora because yum and RedHat. ( ..lol )

Thx ppl.

Currently thinking of changing my dual boot setup on my desktop for ESXi with Windows (with GPU passthrough) and Ubuntu as second VM...
What do you think?

So i tried getting some games i play on windows to work with wine and steam.
After swearing and installing all the shitty dependencies it doesnt feel any good. And worst of all i knew not all games are going to work though.

As i wanted a good and portable setup i thought alright maybe this is going to be a good use case for docker. But its a pure nightmare to get everything running fine. At the end i gave up that shit.

So dual boot is still the only way for me to be able to play games without hacks and an unreasonable amount of work.

Using gpu passthrough to kvm is a pure nightmare too. I mean what the hack, the best way to use it is to have two fcking video cards?! And yeah the integrated intel shit graphics are no option.

I mean why the fuck is it even necessary to perform dirty hacks because the most game publishers dont give a fuck about linux.

Seriously it isnt that fucking hard! And Proton is a good step for some games, but only as a temporarily solution, that only exists because of shitty game publishers.

It is horrible, its 2020 and i still cant get fully independent from windows, no matter how hard i try.

Is it that fucking hard to add builds for linux to their shitty games?!