Yeah, that’s really the most straightforward solution unfortunately.

In case you’re not already familiar look into sunshine/moonlight for quick access to the windows machine

If you need to use abusive windows software while retaining some privacy you really have 2 options:

1. Have a separate PC with windows and your games installed. Isolate your activities so all your normal work and personal stuff is on linux, and then you switch input on your display, or use sunshine/moonlight to access windows when you want to.

2. Use linux and do all your gaming etc. in a windows VM. This is what I do but it is not easy to set up, if you’re interested in this idea keep it in mind and come back to it later.

If you’re using VM hostile software though which it sounds like you are, #2 becomes even more complicated so I say bite the bullet and do #1.

Dualboot is pretty ass and breaks all the time. I strongly suspect that was part of your issue

I am baffled to read you had to troubleshoot your linux installation every day, what kind of distro were you using?

Sorry you didn’t have a good time.

If you know what you’re doing yes (not guaranteed to work in all games), but you’re always at constant threat of being potentially banned.

The info is hard to find but I assure you tons of people play anticheat games in VMs all the time. I personally avoid those games so I don’t know the specifics of all the tricks they do to hide the VM.

Being it’s a VM I could see some people just restoring from a template if they get banned and not really caring. No way to be hardware banned afaik.

This VM detection and VM anti detection is a reguarly evolving arms race, and some games invest a LOT more effort into staying on top of it than others.

ya the desktop gui is pretty ram hungry as well. It’s not perfect but weighing the pros and cons of all available options I have come to like and appreciate simplex quite a bit. The client has also gotten a lot better recently.

The main downside on android for me is the battery drain but I think that is a consequence of me not using google push notifications

Simplex is an option, you can host your own servers and it has crossplatform GUI + CLI

I think it’s pretty cool, and it’s pretty easy to set up (there are a lot of options you may wanna look at though)

https://simplex.chat/

https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplex-chat