For me it was the same drive. I remember I had to generate a special file to convince VirtualBox to use the physical partition as if it was part of a different drive. I don’t remember the details. Quite hacky perhaps, but it worked.

Iirc I had a Windows 7 (maybe 8 or 10) Home OEM, original (not cracked), but it still worked. Perhaps if I had kept using it for long periods in the VM it would have started complaining? Anyways I booted it baremetal from time to time, so maybe that’s why it kept working.

That would definitely be a technical challenge, but also it’s absolutely possible.

I used to do dual-boot Windows + Linux and I could run the Linux installation from a VM in Windows as well as the Windows installation from a VM in Linux.

When rebooting between metal and VM, Windows would always spend a few minutes “doing things” before continuing to boot, but it worked.

Linux would not even fret. It would just boot normally without any complaints.

I don’t remember exactly which distro I had at the time, but probably it was Linux Mint.

If you don’t want proprietary drivers the choice is quite straightforward: AMD. The official drivers are open source.

As for my experience, I’ve had absolutely no problems in the last few years with AMD, but I have to admit that I have always been using an iGPU, which has always been good enough for my needs.

I used to have problems with Nvidia proprietary drivers, but that was at least a couple years ago, things might have changed. I’ve never had issues with the free unofficial drivers, besides worse performance.