Wonderful life of having siblings use your computer

DeoNaught said:

@FAST6191 You need a good amount of resources for it [virtualisation] though don't you? my desktop has 5th/6th i3 and 6GB ram.

Click to expand...

Anything other than the bottom of the barrel of Intel's processors (so celeron and atom and such) since the core2 era have had virtualisation extensions and whatnot. I don't know if they are automatically enabled in BIOS these days but should be as it tends not to bother things (check anyway). This basically means the CPU is free to do what it likes. 6 gigs of memory is more than enough to run a copy of Windows 10 and then host another copy that your family can use. As you would presumably close the VM and use the host machine to do what you want to do then all it would cost you is a bit of hard drive space and the time to set it up.
Looking at Intel's ark thing some of the older I3 stuff does not support the really fancy virtualisation with I/O stuff (ways to pass through the graphics card as far as most are concerned) but all seem to have the baseline stuff.

If you have to sell it to parental types then you have already demonstrably had to remove malware from the machine, possibly more than once and not for reasons of a 0 day was suddenly discovered*. This will help protect their credit cards and lessen the chances of identity theft, also "it is a skill people get paid a lot to know and where computers are heading".

*about the only malware I remove these days is from laptops people give their younger kids and said kids want to play games. I delouse it, make sure there are a wide selection of games on there, try to have some security (up to and including ad blocking to try to prevent these messages) and... guess who gets called back in a few weeks/months later when "it's slow and has popups". Parents and I tried explaining things (they don't want to have to pay me, I don't want to have to do it) but it happens anyway.

@DeoNaught Actually, thanks to GPU passthrough and Looking Glass: https://looking-glass.hostfission.com/ it's now possible to get very close to a native experience running games in a VM under linux, and performance with GPU passthrough is almost as good as native.

There's also Steam's modified version of Wine, which makes gaming on Linux as easy as gaming on Windows as long as the games you are trying to play already have profiles set up to work with them out of the box, and feels just like running games natively.

I loaned my younger brother my desktop PC while I was in between moving, and my mom deleted all my files, music, games, you name it. Installed a bunch of junk on it, too. Like, WTF. I'm an adult, and you don't own this PC. It's still mine. "Cleaning viruses," my ass. So I feel your pain.