Another VM desktop win

I’ve mentioned more than a few times here that I bounce around to different computers constantly. I often get my hands on computers other people consider trash and I like to play around with what they can do, no matter how old they are. I also love Samsung Dex and in the post just before this one I commented on how I use a VM desktop as an assist on my phone as needed.

Well, I recently had another moment where I used this VM desktop and made me so thrilled I have it always ready.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been slowly moving my office back into my bedroom after some house shuffling. My oldest moved out and my wife and I no longer have to use a large closet as our bedroom, we can have an actual room! During this move I decided to keep my Dell Precision M4700 laptop as my primary PC and then install Windows on a Dell Optiplex 3040 SFF that I’ve turned into a franken-gaming PC.

I decided to go with Windows for two reasons:

1. I occasionally need a Windows PC around and having a physical device with Windows around is helpful.
2. I don’t have the patience for Linux gaming at the moment.

When I find time to play games, I kinda just want it to work. I don’t want to search ProtonDB, enter run commands, and install a handful of management apps for the various runtimes. I’d like to just pick any game from my Steam library, install, and play (I’m aware this isn’t always the case on Windows, but happens way more frequently than on Linux).

I love Linux. I use it as my primary desktkop. Its on my homelab and literally every other computer I own. Just passing on it for now with gaming.

However, I did run into an issue while on the gaming PC. While installing a game, I wanted to quickly do another task. But, all my tooling is on Linux and this task involved connecting to my homelab. But I have no desire for my gaming PC to have anything else on it, except gaming.

Easy. Peasy.

I loaded up Remote Desktop, connected to my VM desktop, got my task done, and moved on.

It was glorious.

This is the exact reason I set up this VM desktop. I wanted the ability to get to a full Linux desktop with all my tooling from literally any device. All I need is a RDP client or a web browser and I am good to go.

A small win for me this week, but I’ll take any win I can get.

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