Running windows in a VM

Framework Laptop 13 Linux
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1

Dear all,

I’m running Fedora 40 on a AMD FW13 and it’s a joy to use. Unfortunately I still need to use Windows for work at the university that I’m working at.

The other day I wanted to connect the FW13 to a beamer to give a lecture and it didn’t recognise the beamer, which was possible with my Dell Uni Laptop without a problem.
Ideally I would like to run windows in a VM and have tried the pre installed Box and KVM.
In both I wasn’t able to connect windows to the internet to download programs like office.
The alternative would be dual boot, but that seems less convenient and is an outdated setup from what I read.

Would I need to install drivers in the VM to get the network working in there or is there a setting to pass-through the network connection?

What are your experiences, are most people using VMs or is dual boot the better option?

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Windows in a VM will work, but the networking can get complicated if you need something more than NAT. You can pass devices through to the VM. You do need to install drivers in windows to get everything working. For KVM, see here: virtio-win-pkg-scripts/README.md at master · virtio-win/virtio-win-pkg-scripts · GitHub

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3

Perfect thank you. So you install the drivers in Fedora not within the VM?

4

You would download the ISO in your host OS (Fedora), then mount it in the VM and install the drivers within the VM.

5

brilliant, thank you.

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6

My Windows 11 VM is running fine (using qemu/kvm or proxmox), but i did install all the drivers of the iso.
I use pci-passthrough of the dGPU to run games, but when not running games, it will also work fine with virgl-gpu, even if you don’t have a dGPU.
I’ve setup networking using NAT, because bridging using the wifi adapter is not generally possible. If you use the ethernet expansion card, then probably you can setup bridging as well, and have shared access with the host.

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7

I had an error in the network Ethernet adapter in the VM with a yellow sign next to the adapter. Deleting that adapter solved the issue though and I now have a working win10 in a VM.

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I would recommend VMWare Workstation, BUT with Broadcom now owning VMWare I don’t know how valuable that is. I do use Workstation still and I can run Windows through a VM on Ubuntu, and passing USB and HDMI as well as internet to Windows all works.

9

Use cockkpit (the web interface that comes with fedora, and install the machines application there). It provides everything (and more) vmware workstation does and you can interact via the webinterface or a full client, supports USB/PCI passthrough out of the box. For the networking you will want bridge/macvtap direct if it relies on something. Or you can just pass the entire network card through to the windows guest for the duration of the session.

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I’d recommend using Virtualbox. It is way lighter in resources.
From experience, I could run 4 Virual machines in parallel (including 1 Windows 10) on my Latitude 7400 with 32Gb Ram fine, while VMWare after starting the 2nd VM, it started getting sluggish.

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I use Windows 11 VM (qemu/kvm/libvirt + virt-manager) on Fedora Silverblue 40 host on FW 13" AMD. It is a bit complicated to set up libvirt on Fedora Atomic, but if you have regular Fedora Workstation, that’s quite easy. One thing to note - have windows guest addons and disk, network and VirtIO drivers for Windows before you begin the install.

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