this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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You've got two things going on:
Might try the boot USB route. I wanted to do a virtual box so I could easily test to see if my current games/programs work
Going to second dream_weasel's suggestion. Don't try to game in a VM. That is going the ultra-hard route while you are still unfamiliar with the OS.
My suggestion is to take a side/old computer you don't use every day, format it, and install Linux on it. Completely blow away Windows on that machine. Then use it regularly until you get comfortable with it. You still have your main computer to lean on.
Once you are comfortable enough with it, flip the script. Put Linux on the main machine and Windows on the side/old machine. You will find yourself turning on the side/old machine less and less.
So I don't really have an unused side/old computer that is operational. I'm an engineer, but not the computer kind.
Dual booting is an option, but without two separate drives (or sometimes even with windows on a separate disk), windows update will just nuke your EFI partition and do its own thing.
It's possible, but I probably wouldn't recommend to a beginner, as bootloader issues are usually not fun to fix (had to do it a lot when I was dual-booting back in the day)
Goodwill is your friend
I think that will require you to do some passthrough for drives and hardware which may not be trivial. If you're close to something working, stick to it. Otherwise I think that VM road is mostly pain. Caveat: I have not tried to do VM stuff in probably 10 years so it could be easier now.
You can also just search game name + distro name. Highly recommend looking at the newest results possible because A LOT of games now work on Linux thanks to steam and proton