Windows vms for beating kernel level anticheat takes a lot of work to prevent detection. I recommend dual booting instead for that use case.

For the Linux environments I’d recommend using containers/podman/docker, systemd-nspawn or libvirt. These three solutions use the host kernel as the hypervisor and don’t require much setup.

Containers can also share the GPU with the host easily.

Your setup would be Hardware > Windows | Bazzite > Ubuntu(container) | OSX (libvirtd)

Edit: You can also triple boot with windows, Bazzite and Ubuntu or add a proxmox/whatever hypervisor disk and try it out without touching your working system.

My solution to this problem was to buy a $180 Dell workstation off eBay and install Ubuntu on that as my main workstation. My gaming desktop is now in the basement and runs sunshine. Moonlight over LAN is basically native, and solves the annoying reboot to switch tasks scenario.

Its very complex and overkill but its not a bad idea if you want to do it. I believe there is a youtuber SomeOrdinaryGamer who runs a linux base OS with hypervisor OSs on top with GPU passthrough.

You could also take a look at this linux distro designed https://www.qubes-os.org/.

I hacked together a similar setup back when, for logistical reasons, I had to squeeze everything on one machine.

It’s doable, but be prepared for some challenges.

You will probably have a much better time than I did given the abundance of RAM. Getting graphics to work properly is the most arduous part. I never really figured that part out. Having to forward USB accessories also got really tedious.

I use VMs a lot for desktops doing development work. It’s certainly possible, with some caveats. Here’s a bit of a knowledge-dump that may be helpful.

Multiple displays can be tricky. If you just want a single monitor you’re fine. But hypervisors have varying support for more than one display and some do it better than others. VirtualBox had the absolute best support for it. Hyper-V has “support” for it but only really if you use their preferred Ubuntu install. I’m not sure how libvirt handles it. Remote display protocols have varying support and can be options - rustdesk seems to support it very nicely (one window per display like VirtualBox) but I’ve had lots of keyboard issues with that.

Running VMs is less efficient, you’ll need more memory in the base system to handle each VM but it sounds like you’re pretty decked out there.

Access to hardware can be tricky. Hyper-V sucks at this - don’t use it if you can help it. I’ve never quite done gaming in a VM but I suspect this would be the most problematic. I have done libvirt pass-through of an nvidia card but only for video encoding/decoding with Jellyfin - which does work just fine. But VM displays tend not to be well accelerated so I would expect other issues. As an example my hyper-v Linux guest can’t play video above a small resolution without the audio skipping and losing track.

I’d avoid Hyper-V entirely. It absolutely sucks as a desktop environment. It relies heavily on RDP “enhanced mode” for everything, has shitty support for hardware pass-through, etc. Just a complete fail.

VirtualBox was really quite good for a desktop environment - but Oracle is more lawfirm than software company these days. There are hidden license issues with using any extensions (for, e.g. accelerated displays).

Libvirt I don’t have as much experience with unfortunately. I’ve usually emulated Linux on Windows not the other way 'round.

I work four days a week on a remote windows vm. It has everything I need, and I remote from /that/ onto whatever other vm I might need. I connect over a vpn using, well, anything. As you’ve pointed out, the local machine doesn’t need much in the way of specs, although in my case I have three monitors - all given over to the remote, and it’s a clean way to separate work’s environment and network from my own and it’s a very common work pattern. The hypervisor there is vmware, but that doesn’t matter.

But… Gaming is a different. There is latency over the conn, and audio/graphic lag would make FPS and gpu-heavy games particularly poor. I don’t know of a way to totally overcome that, although game-streaming services exist, so presumably it is possible.

Conceptually, not a problem. Windows 11 runs on top of HyperV with no performance issues. In reality, I think you will spend a lot of time, hit lots of weird edge cases and performance issues, especially with trying to get the Linux and windows hosts to coexist nicely.

That said, I’d love to watch you try :)

You will need to continue dual booting or you will need to use two computers. I promise there is no hope in virtualization for your use case. I have personally considered myself the exception to this rule and discovered everyone else was right all along. Save yourself the time.

Pro tip: you will not find a CPU + Chipset that supports 2 GPUs at full speed. If you think you have, read the specs closer. You may also throw away your M.2 bandwidth as well. If you can afford an enterprise CPU with enough PCI-E lanes, you should just build two computers

Can’t comment on everything, but given you mentioned audio production: a couple of years ago I tried to get ASIO working from within a VM on a Linux host OS and wasn’t having a whole lot of luck.

I think I read somewhere that someone had come up with a special ASIO driver to send the audio directly into the host Linux OS audio subsystem, but I’ve not tried that or measured latency yet.

If you are fine with having things on the same OS, look into distrobox. It would let you set up an Ubuntu environment/container on top of your Bazzite install. You could also use something like OSX-KVM for MacOS with GPU passthrough (assuming you use a compatible GPU) which would simplify your setup greatly. That way you could technically have all 3 environments on one OS with one set of hardware but now the only thing being virtualized is MacOS.

(You could also dual-boot with MacOS if you wanted and it would be slightly faster than a VM but also more of a headache to setup)

Edit: Missed that you mentioned Windows but the setup for that would be pretty much the exact same as MacOS except getting GPU passthrough to work on Windows is easier (again, same limitations as MacOS though, and games with anticheats would be able to tell that Windows is in a VM).

This only works for simple workstation stuff, not for power users trying to get max performance. My recommend is dual/tripple boot or separate computers.