I'm just about ready to make the leap and become completely windows free! =) As usual, gaming is really the only thing that has kept me tied to windows for so long. I have gotten a few programs to run under Wine without too much of a hassle, but I am wondering if it would make more sense to just have a virtual Windows machine with all of my games installed on it? I am familiar with the concept of virtualization but have never actually used it, is it difficult to set up?

Which would be better in terms of performance, or in ease of use?

Also, I have 2 nVidia 6800 video cards that I would like to use SLI with, will linux (fedora 9 specifically) recognize this out of the box, do I need some special drivers or is it more of a hassle than it is worth?

To my knowledge, no virtual machine can offer 3d graphics yet. I'm not sure how well wine would perform with SLI. My suggestion would be to dual boot, and use Windows strictly for gaming and use Linux for everything else, that's what I do.

SLI for Fedora: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=116239

Don't be too intimidated by looking at xorg.conf

Thanks Berticus, dual-booting is probably the simplest solution, my only worry is that I will find excuses to slowly switch back to Windows as my primary OS rather than dealing with problems I come across with Linux (this has happened a few times). I'm getting more proficient every time I try to switch though, so maybe I do finally have the discipline to stick with it despite any problems I encounter.

I have an even worse suggestion: Windows as your primary OS, and Linux in a VM.

Virtual Machines do not offer the amount of video acceleration you need, they have a virtual adapter and that is it. To my knowledge there is no 'pass thru' from the VM to your graphics hardware and that is what you need. Maybe worth checking. If no such thing exists, you are more or less bound to have Windows running on top of the bare hardware.

As for Wine, I have terrible record. Besides the 'tried and true' examples like Office and Internet Explorer and such I have not been able to get any of my obscure Windows applications which will never be available for Linux to work in Wine. I fear something like that for your games as well, but I don't know what games you want to install.

Or buy a new gaming machine and use your ancient hardware for Linux.

Dual booting looks gruesome to me.

jlinkels

Wine is pretty much hit and miss. Some games work more or less perfectly (e.g. Deus Ex), some work reasonably, while others (perhaps most) don't work at all. Even games that use the same basic engine can behave very differently. Also note that some games work better with a particular version of wine,so it's wise to keep a few older versions of wine around, rather than just using the latest.

Nah, dual booting isn't bad at all. I learnt how to dual boot around the time I learnt that Windows was an operating system, not a computer And back then I had only heard of the term driver once and had no clue what it did.

That's what I did at first, but I slowly phased into Linux. Now, I can't go back to Windows. Every time I'm in that environment, I hate it and wish I was back on Linux.