Moving to Windows
The -almost- perfect

When the relentless chase of ideals outpaces your grasp, and the practical path calls for the surrender of your dreams, which journey will you take? The one that pushes you to grow beyond, or the one that preserves your ideals, though it asks for restraint?

Why Write This?

Mainly for myself and those who could be in a similar position, this is a document of my thoughts as they run down my head more than anything else.

The Dream

A few years ago I dreamed of an awesome PC, one that can do so much, virtual machines, GPU passthrough, server work, all the bells and whistles. Last year I managed to acquire such a machine, a lovely 9750X CPU with 64 GB of DDR5 RAM to load anything on it and I initially did, under Proxmox:

  • Windows VM with GPU for gaming
  • Many virtual machines for all sorts of home-lab services
  • TrueNAS VM for durable storage
  • Linux VM for work and another for general browsing

Reality

All was great until I wanted to do some audio production, I attempted to pass my USB audio card (Focusrite 2i4) which did pass but all I heard was audio crackling. Tried again with a Linux VM, same thing… I ended up formatting and running NixOS as the bare-metal operating system and attempted again to run my audio suite of tools, no dice. Spitfire, JUCE development, iZotope, Native Instruments, all do not work. Even open source applications such as Guitarix and MuseHub do not work under Nix for example.

The Crash

For the past few weeks, there have been a lot of pains whether in games I can not run, software which I bought before now unable to use. I sort of broke down and started to wonder if my chase of ideals was worth the sacrifice of my time whether in what I do not have or what I have to tinker with.

Now What?

Linux desktop is great for anyone who isn't like me, always tinkering with a ton of hobbies, if you just work on office documents, emails or use your applications in the browser, Linux is fantastic, it crashes way less, it's more robust and sometimes makes your laptop and PC run faster and better. But me, I am the exception, I need so much Linux does not cover it.