My current daily driver is Debian. I'm planning to retire my Win10 Pro completely to audio production, but I'm unwilling to ditch it completely. Even if Reaper is available for Linux, I've got a bunch of plugins which are only available for Win and MacOS, so my current setup is dual booting.
I'm toying with the idea of skipping dual booting as well, and run Windows as a Virtual Machine; either VirtualBox or KVM, w/o even internet access except when absolutely needed. I believe my system (Intel i7-6700HQ @ 2.6GHz / 64GB RAM, very lightweight OS) can handle the production tasks I have, but I'm concerned about things like audio interface latency, OS access to iLok key etc.
- Does anyone have experience to share on this kind of setup, i.e. running a DAW on a VM?
- What kind of things I need to take into account, especially the
non-obvious? - Are there reliable Linux plugins that allow running Win VST:s / VST3:s without introducing too much latency etc.?