I also went down this path but for a different reason. Game streaming to my steam deck from my ultrawide monitor wasn't practical. The games on whales project is really good, it's not VM but rather containerized game sessions. It has numerous issues with podman sadly which is why I now use edvi and various scripts to just generate a fake monitor to stream.
- I bought windows 11 retail on a USB stick. (before the AI nonsense, etc)
- I run windows in a VM without a network interface. This eliminates SO MANY PROBLEMS. microsoft being problem #1
- I disabled all nonsense, windows defender was slightly harder
- I share a drive with linux (only one booted at once)
- linux runs lgogodownloader to load all my gog games onto the shared drive
- I install the games under windows from the shared drive
- someday I might change shared drive to virtiofs
- gpu passthrough
- I pass through an entire USB controller for audio, and plug in a USB schiit dac + headphones. passing the controller is key for glitchless audio
- some day maybe I'll figure out a steam VM. like maybe connect stuff once, download game for offline play, then take it off the network forever. Maybe have VMs for collections of games.
The best option is to run a Windows host with WSL and an extra EXT4 volume mounted to both windows and linux (this is a non issue as long as it's not the boot drive for linux). User WSL for everything linux, optionally you can also just mount the EXT4 volume with all your stuff to a real VM if you need to (this lets you have windows GUI apps in windows, tho maybe WSL does this now too?). Everything works, you have the best of all worlds.
- I bought windows 11 retail on a USB stick. (before the AI nonsense, etc)
- I run windows in a VM without a network interface. This eliminates SO MANY PROBLEMS. microsoft being problem #1
- I disabled all nonsense, windows defender was slightly harder
- I share a drive with linux (only one booted at once)
- linux runs lgogodownloader to load all my gog games onto the shared drive
- I install the games under windows from the shared drive
- someday I might change shared drive to virtiofs
- gpu passthrough
- I pass through an entire USB controller for audio, and plug in a USB schiit dac + headphones. passing the controller is key for glitchless audio
- some day maybe I'll figure out a steam VM. like maybe connect stuff once, download game for offline play, then take it off the network forever. Maybe have VMs for collections of games.
So for someone who is constrained to one PC, is dual booting the better option, or is there something else?