Used to be in a tiny IRC channel with someone that used Xen to be able to run Windows for gaming with PCIe passthrough. 90% of their posts in that channel (not really a technical channel) was complaining about PCIe passthrough breaking and asking for help debugging it.
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yeah I've tried it, hit an issue with PAT/MTRR and write combining ranges in graphical memory, tried fixing it, decided KVM it is (I might actually set up KVM with PCIe passthrough if wine doesn't work out)
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I personally prefer having Windows on a totally different machine for gaming. For some reason I still have my better GPU in my workstation from back when I thought dual booting was a good idea but... that'll be fixed when I replace it with a new workstation.
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I have a spare TB nvme waiting for me to drop linux on it in my big workstation, and I've been looking at various distros update behavior in fear. I think systemd-boot is going to be ok, but half the distros hold it wrong
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I have quite literally been considering starting a distro just to get sane updates and reasonable systemd purity recently.
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Depends what you mean when you say sane updates.
On my workstation, I want the current stable release of software and minimal hassle so I use Arch and make Debian stable containers with debootstrap and systemd-nspawn to deal with legacy things not fond of an up-to-date system.
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I'm not a systemd fan at all, but I prefer having the full adoption of systemd in Arch as opposed to a distribution with a mess of different approaches and all kinds of distribution-specific scripts and configurations. I really don't have the time and energy to deal with Debian.
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Right, exactly, the debian/ubuntu half and half mess is a real disaster. The more I use systemd the more I like it, and they fix issues on average in less than a week after I submit them, so +1
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Basically, what you get with Arch is the current stable releases of software, as released by upstream, with minimal package splitting, downstream changes, etc. It's as close to non-existent as a distribution gets, which for me results in the least possible pain and hassle.
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It's an entirely traditional distribution without compelling or interesting technologies for updates, package management, etc. and that's pretty much what I want. I mostly just want my workstation to work properly. This works well for me. Using NixOS, etc. would be a real pain.
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I do all my work with containers, language package managers, etc. so I don't really need a fancy OS package manager. I rarely do more than updating with it and I don't really have that much installed. I like having hand-rolled containers I can just blow up and recreate as needed.
Yeah, I'm glad to hear of another nspawn user. I've been using it heavily for the last year with all kinds of things inside. It's been working really well for me.
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I think I started using it ~2012 and I've never really had a compelling reason to use something else. If I need another development / testing environment, I reach for pacstrap and systemd-nspawn out of habit. If it needs an old userspace, I use debootstrap instead.