Hello,

I`m fed up with win10 and want to switch to linux, but I need the adobe creative cloud for work.

Right now I`m kinda overwhelmed with all the distros. I want a light distro as my host system, where I do all stuff like browsing, coding and other everyday tasks, and then I want to host a win10 vm in there and passthrough one of my gpu`s or if it`s possible even both in sli, for gaming and win only programms like adobe cc.

So the question is, "what distro should I choose" and "what is the most performant way to host a win10 vm".


I hope this is the right section.

And thanks for your help.

Welcome to LQ, kevgk.

1st post, but you're not a newbie, but on the bottom of a steep learning curve. Prepare to forget most things you knew and learn a whole lot you didn't.

Adobe isn't a linux friendly company. They gave up on their Acrobat reader, never ported it to 64 bit, and abandoned Flash at version 11.x until it was being replaced by html 5.

As for distributions and window managers, everyone will recommend their choice. I use Slackware64, but I wouldn't recommend it initially as it's a bit more hands-on. Promote yourself to it later.

• You don't want an enterprise version (lousy for gaming)
• You want something that can use 3rd party proprietary drivers (Not Debian, tails, etc)
• You don't want to compile yet, I imagine (better not Slackware,Gentoo, LFS)
• You do want a mainstream distro or updates could be lacking

That leaves Ubuntu & Mint as obvious contenders. Both should set up most thingsup. Make use of google to sort things because besides all the intelligent and able people, plenty of dweebs use those distros and have asked newbie questions and the answers are out there. Linux has Steam, and a lot of games work under it.

I have windows 10 in virtualbox and it works. Due to it's reporting habits, it doesn't have my email, or name. On the odd occasion I permit it to live, it sits up saying "Hello, Tight [removed]!":-)

Thanks for the reply business_kid.

So I would most likely use mint then, cause I feel Ubuntu is kinda bloated.

But whats the best way to virtualize the win10 instance?

I used virtualbox and vmware workstation player before, but wasn`t really satisfied with the performance.

While doing some research I stumbled upon kvm and qemu, where I think kvm is a distro itself and qemu is more like a virtualbox solution, right?

It would be very nice, if you could give me a sugesstion on what program, other than virtualbox or vmware player I should use, preferably with capabilities to passthrough my gpu.


Thanks in advance!

I can't compare the virtues of the various environments, I've just used VB. I'm sure you'll find some benchmarks on google.

I imagine steam, and wine is a better/faster solution for games than a windows 10. Wine translates windows syscalls to linux ones without the overhead of a vm and win10. Normally in a vm, all output (network, graphics, usb etc.) is passed to the main system. For gpu passthrough, the gpu has to be disabled/ignored in the main system, and have it's fancy drivers in windows 10. That's usually doable in Settings.

Games in the main sniff around a box looking at what resources you have and grab them. That sets your performance level. VMs allow you to slice up resources like a cake and give the vm a slice, but are alarmed if you're giving it over 50%. So you'll have a portion of your cpu power running win 10 running a game, and game performance will probably suck.

I'm no gamer, but Look at steam, and wine for your games. Wine is quicker and is now pretty good. Another thing to know is that much windows stuff is still, amazingly, 32 bit. Mint comes with 64 bit libs only so you'll have to go 'multilib,' i.e. install 32 & 64 bit libs. Mint accommodates that, but I'm not sure how.

Either way, your performance will be down on pure windows 10 under linux.