this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2026
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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).

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[–] data1701d@startrek.website 4 points 6 days ago

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.