I’m currently dual booting Linux Mint and Windows. Love Linux, hate Windows. So why I am dual booting?
Because I own and use a Microsoft Zune HD.
It’s probably the best product Microsoft ever came out with. It’s so much lighter than my phone, it has a ton of my music on there, and it has an HD FM radio tuner. However, the software that runs it has never been released so there aren’t really any good options to try and manage the Zune on Linux (some people have tried, it doesn’t really work). So I keep a windows partition just so I can manage a 16 year old mp3 player and radio. That has to be the worst reason to keep a Windows partition, right?
(The reality is I would probably get rid of the Windows partition if I could, I’ve tried but something seems wrong with the BIOS on my computer idk I’m not a programmer. The Zune software is pretty janky at the point so uploading new music barely works anyway).
You dont want to use windows in a vm to talk to externally connected devices or update them…ask me how I know
Bricked my favorite mouse doing this firmware upgrade for it on linux with a win 10 vm. I was sad but after a few days amazingly, the mfg sent me a custom program to reset the mouse, and it was windows only, had to use a friends pc to do it.
And I did it using usb pass through. I would not trust it again.
Sounds like a freak accident rather than the fault of the VM.
I literally use a GPU for passthrough on my Windows 10 (and macOS) VM; PCIe is a much more complex protocol and much easier to F up than USB.
I’ve used my iPhone many times through Windows and been fine, as well as whole USB keyboards and mice (just simple ones); I think I might have even updated an iOS device once, though I can’t remember if I actually did. I’ve also used an iPod Nano 7th through an 11 LTSC VM before.
I could see some things being a little finicky, but simply managing a Zune with a VM probably causes no issues. It’s probably been eons since it got a firmware upgrade anyway.
How weird! I ran two Windows VMs with USB and GPU passthrough as my work and gaming daily drivers for about six years. Now I run Mint and Bazzite with the same setup. I’m not going to lie and say I didn’t have issues, both Windows and VM related, but I never saw one even vaguely like that.
Well, I was using virtual box as ive never used anything else, so maybe thats why. Or the mouse firmware updater was just bad.
i have used a windows vm to update mice (and some other things’) firmware before and it went quite well.
I’ve done that plenty of times with phones and ham radio junk