Replacing a Windows system - suggestions or advice?

[dr_grid]

Greetings all,

I have used FreeBSD for ten or more years now and it is my preferred operating system. I do not use GUIs, strictly command line interface
for me.

My brother has purchased new hardware, and wanted my advice on a Linux distribution. Given the headaches I have read about keeping the
Linux kernel updates in sync with the various packages, I am strongly urging him to consider FreeBSD. Plus I can give him free support.

He has a few Windows apps that he still needs to run however. He would like to be able to open a window on a UNIX/Linux system, and run
Windows applications in that window. Dual boot is a no-go.

My question is basically would the following do the job for him? Fresh install of FreeBSD, a GUI like KDE, and use bhyve for a VM to run his
Windows stuff? Are there better software and package selections? Are there hidden gotchas with Windows under bhyve?

He also wants to continue using OpenOffice and Firefox, but both of these are supported in FreeBSD, so they should not be a problem.

Any and all advice is welcome. Many thanks.

 

[tingo]

Support for physical hardware (example: usb attached devices) when you run windows in a vm (virtual machine) is hard, to my knowledge it will not work with bhyve. Other than that most things should work. But it would be prudent to test the specific Windows programs he will be using in a windows vm to verify that they work.
Wine (emulators/wine) is also an alternative for many Windows programs, it might be more lightweight than a vm.

General advice: spend some time with the GUIs you both will use, to get comfortable and be able to provide better support (apologies if you have already thought of this).

 

[bgavin]

If he needs to run TurboTax or Quickbooks then Win11 is required.

VMware Workstation or ESXi hosts will provide the mandatory UEFI bios and optional TPM v2 required by Win11.

Dunno about VM under FBSD

 

[nxjoseph]

Do the windows applications they need require graphics acelleration? Because as far as i know, bhyve doesn't support graphics acceleration without something like dedicated gpu passthrough to the VM. Also the applications may not work if they would detect it is ran under a VM.

Support for physical hardware (example: usb attached devices) when you run windows in a vm (virtual machine) is hard, to my knowledge it will not work with bhyve.

I didn't research this topic but I did achieve to the solution via doing a passthrough one of the usb controllers of my pc to the vm, this led me use the front panel usb ports on my pc case to connect something to the vm. It may not be possible for everyone, for example, this may not work on laptops etc. but im not sure.