This is just a Windows VM with extra tooling. Makes it look slick, doesn't make it "Windows apps on Linux".
Similar projects exist for gaming for example Looking Glass, which also uses a Windows VM on KVM (the "Windows in Docker" thing is a bit of a lie, Windows doesn't run in the container, Windows runs on KVM on the host kernel).
UX wise, this is similar to RAIL.
That's not to say that this isn't neat, but it's also not something new (we still have two flavours: API simulation/re-implementation and running the OS [windows]). If this was a new, third flavour, that would be quite the news (in-place ABI translation?).
And I had to come here to find out what it actually was. Why don't project pages ever actually tell you what it is, what it does and how it does it?
Half the time it's something like "Plorglewurzle leverages your big data block chain to provide sublinear microservices to Azure Cloud infrastructures"
At least this one kind of shows you having to install Windows.
Unfortunately many companies have realized that engineers don't make purchasing decisions. (Mearly suggestions) Rather, C-Suite, who knows nothing about the technical side of things, and everything about the buzzword side, makes the decisions. As a result, companies know that if they just throw a bunch of inflated marketing mumbo-jumbo at the user, while it will turn off every engineer asking "WTF does this actually do and how does it work", some C-Suite will run out and purchase it without asking, then force their entire team to use it because it "produces synergy of the AI block chain and big data cloud APIs while enhancing productivity". Then us Engineers are stuck using it, whether we wanted it or not.
> Why don't project pages ever actually tell you what it is
If it's a good thing with substance, they do.
If they don't, don't use it. This usually hints at a broken culture/missing substance. It _can_ also be ineptitude, but that too is not your problem but theirs.
You woke up this morning not having the problem this sets out to solve. You can go to sleep and rest easily this night, knowing that you still don't have whatever problem this sets out to solve.
If you should one day wake up and notice that you have a problem this could solve, you will find yourself googling for a solution, again side-stepping this whole marketing nonsense.
I think this name would be confusing.
For one - it is for linux, not windows.And it is a subsystem running Windows. So, it should be called Windows Subsystem for Linux, or WSL.
I think this may be a woosh moment where they're saying the Microsoft version should be called LSW because it's for Windows. Probably sounds more obvious with a more sarcastic tone
The concept of a "subsystem" in Windows has evolved since the operating system's inception when Windows NT was designed to support multiple operating system environments through distinct subsystems. Win32 subsystem, which features case-insensitive filenames and device files in every directory, and the POSIX subsystem, which supports case-sensitive filenames and centralized device files: Windows subsystem, the Subsystem for Unix-based Applications (SUA), and the Native subsystem for kernel-mode code were the main subsystems at first.
/SUBSYSTEM linker switch was used to specify the target subsystem at compile time, enabling applications to be compiled for different environments such as console applications, EFI boot environments, or native system processes.
In this nomenclature, WSL follows the original naming conventions (although SUA should have been called WSUA).
Except WSL doesn't actually use any of the nt subsystem machinery in either of its incarnations.
And also, it doesn't really follow that nomenclature. Those all follow "user code target" Subsystem. Windows Subsystem, OS/2 Subsystem, Posix Subsystem, etc.
I think this is accurate. WSL v1 did not use a VM, just like Wine. However both WSL v1 and Wine struggled with compatibility issues. WSL 2 gave up and used a VM instead. You pay a performance penalty but compatibility issues mostly go away.
Well, I discrepe a lot with the "compatibility issues" of Wine... Essentially when sometimes can run better and with less issues legacy software that modern Windows.
It's literally just dockur/windows:latest + FreeRDP rootless mode + a small daemon that runs in the VM that tells you what apps are installed via an API.
If you don't want the latter part, you'd be better served with the dockur/windows image + FreeRDP
My experience with it is that FreeRDP in rootless mode isn't very good for Windows applications that do anything special with window borders. Using Office and many other programs became a pain.
When it worked, it worked really well, though. Reminds me of the same feature that VMWare used to offer many years ago for running XP/Vista programs on Windows 7 through a VM.
This is incorrect. FreeRDP has supported Wayland since a long time via their `wlfreerdp` client - which is now deprecated, Wayland support is now available via their `sdl3-freerdp` client. The SDL client was alpha quality a couple of years ago, but as of the last couple of recent releases, it's been pretty decent. I'm unsure though if its reached full feature parity yet with the X11 client.
But if using hello@example.com as the email, and using F10 and oobe or whateve command you pulled off Google stop working, and then you have to move to more exotic options, like downloading programs to modify disk images to prepare a USB drive to install an LTSP or IoT copy of windows 10 it's all just such a waste of time to do something that should be easy all because someone at Microsoft got on this kick that what they want is more important than what the customer wants. It's so frustrating!
As a non-coder/engineer Linux user…I’ll admit that’s actually not obvious to me. Linux is trivially easy to run these days.
I could probably drop my dad in Mint and he’d assume windows just looks different. Maybe that’s a tad facetious but also ehhhh I could maybe get away with it
Let me guess. When it gets tricky it fails. USB? Own IP? 3D? Bluetooth?
My recommendation for happiness with Linux is:
Always use native apps. Don’t use WINE. Don’t try to be compatible to inherent hostile things. Don’t use VMs. And especially don’t use Dual-Boot. It sucks.
Basically migrate and go full Linux. Don’t look back :)
Proton (which is WINE derivative) works somehow, because Valve invests every single day tremendous efforts into it. But that’s the problem, tremendous efforts.
The good news. Every bit invested in high quality API/ABI on Linux pays off. Valve contributions to MESA and amdgpu are invaluable. Valve should honor native AAA-Titles and Indie-Titles for Linux - with exclusive Steam Awards. There is awesome stuff like Unrailed. Make the game developers think:
“I better should do a proper port. And it should not be done by the Win32 developer. Task the Linux developer.”
PS: I missed Counter-Strike so much on Linux for years. And the Valve came, ported everything natively, and it is wonderful :)
PPS: I use a Mac for two incompatible applications (Garmin Express and Zwift). Less maintenance than Windows. Less possibilities than Linux. Horrible file-browser. Window management is a pain. But it covers the gap without ruining my day. I have to admit, the Mac cannot run Counter-Strike 2. That’s a task for Linux :)
Bad advice. Counterpoint: Wine works really well (especially for old applications) and there's nothing wrong with using it. If people restrict themselves to arbitrary rules then many won't be able to use Linux.
There is value in those who push by absolutes like this; they are moving the world in their direction; it's important to the market to have some edge-zealots on the demand side. Helps prevent monopoly and is an at-large benefit.
Disclosure: I'm 100% Linux since 2005 (except embed devices (game console, Roku)). All the Line-of-Business stuff "just works".
Long time WINE user. It did break so often. I did run Counter-Strike and other software, and usually an update ruined it. Because? It is not supported. The programmers don’t care about WINE and Linux.
The setup is usually a pain and needs workarounds. Same for weird SMB or Exchange stuff. It is a hell. The admin changes a setting and you’re in trouble.
It was fixed with the native port of Counter-Strike. Exchange was fixed by EU regulation. The other applications found better native replacements. I’m giving you the advice because the “hacker ideology” doesn’t help users. Users need reliability and defined behavior.
The users itself can influence that by using compatible software and APIs. And by requesting it. And we need to pay for it.
Don’t lock back. Don’t stay in a hostile relationship. The same advice applies to government agencies or companies. Prepare. Clean cut.
PS: As mentioned I except Proton (as derivative of WINE). Valve controls Steam. Valve works permanent on fixing new issues. They could told a company to hold the update back to protect Linux.
There's a place for pushing strong philosophical points. But that's not what this comment is. This comment is practical advice, and I think it misses the point.
"Try to avoid relying on proprietary software" is strong. "Avoid any option that exists to run software you think you need" feels out of touch, especially when it says "I use Mac for X and Y" - which is barely practical: having a whole extra, expensive computer that's not maintained forever is quite the costly workaround for an arbitrary stance like "don't use Wine" that they don't motivate so much in the end (there's no practical explanation in that comment for avoiding VMs or Wine - they say maintenance, but I don't see what's hard to maintain in running Wine).
The comment argues "The good news. Every bit invested in high quality API/ABI on Linux pays off.". I do agree. I don't know about high quality, and it hurts a bit to say it, but it so happens that Windows might be the only stable API/ABI on Linux, with Wine being a completely libre reimplementation of it. If you need to write a program that you are reasonably sure will run on any Linux in 20 years without intervention, Wine might be your best bet (with AppImage probably your second best bet). What would be the fundamental (philosophical, practical, technical) reason to avoid targeting Wine? What makes winelib so different from other libraries such that you should avoid it? Genuinely curious. What real alternative is there? Qt and Gtk break the API each major version and even the GNU libc doesn't guarantee ABI stability. The only reasonable alternative is "maintained free software" (and that's what I happen to rely on).
FWIW, I have no stake in this: I use only free software, I mostly don't use Wine nor contribute to it, and I wish I were wrong.
I mean in terms of market here, for games (largest current use case for Wine / proton). Its not really a market. I think the investment for linux over windows is for steam to try and push people away from windows so as to reduce the competition for Xbox Game Pass. In the most recent report for steam, linux users are like 2-3% of the total share. I'm not sure that "edge lords" pushing the market, really factors into valve's decision. If Xbox Game Pass goes under, then I think steam will likely reduce its investment in proton.
Just my take though, I get your point that people spreading this idea and encouraging it have a place and at least its not negative. I just don't think that they really are market movers.
Hey, but put it differently, 3% is every 30th person, so technically, they can brag about how cool and easy Linux is to their friends, who’d install it too. So while 3% sounds like a rounding error, they may shift the pretty quickly, and suddenly that’s 30% one day.
Valve releases Half-Live 3 exclusive as Linux port only. Announces that Windows port will follow at some time undefined time.
That pushes the market. A lot of angry people will become more angry and write posts on the internet. The rest grabs an ISO and decides, that the game matters more than Win11.
That’s not crazy. That is the daily business of Windows, XBox, PlayStation and Nintendo. They even decide deliberately making new games platform exclusive for the newest console, forcing gamers into expensive upgrades for new consoles (and weirdly these people are happy about spending 500 for it).
PS: The shares of Valve will not drop. Valve is - not a stock market company - it is privately owned. That’s the reason why we nice actions from Valve, over long terms. I cannot say what will happen with Microsoft shares.
I found I was unable to install Wine due to package manager conflicts. I had only one Windows program (Everett Kaser's Hero Hearts game) that I wanted to run on Linux, so I wrote my own implementation of the game engine, which is (in my opinion) much better than the original implementation.
I switched my gaming desktop over to Linux last year.
My experience has mostly been that Linux native versions just aren't as good as the Windows-on-Proton version. (Shout out to Larian for their recent BG3 release, a much better native version.)
Totally agree that Proton only works so well because of the constant effort that Valve put into it.
Shouting at game devs to make better native Linux versions isn't going to work. What will work is that the market demographics are slowly moving over to Linux, mostly thanks to Valve, Proton and the Steam Deck.
In practice, the most stable API on Linux is WINE. There are of course things game devs can do to counteract this, but they won't, and WINE works amazingly well for games, so they don't need to either.
Very often what holds you back is not a huge and complex thing like an AAA game, but something far less demanding and obscure. Something like an app to design knitting patterns, elaborate, purpose-built, and without a huge team behind it. Not open-source though. In this case, seamless compatibility is great.
For me (Well, my grandmother) it was Family Tree Maker.
To cut a very long story short - after Windows 10 restarted on her, and changed default browser and application settings too many times she was going to completely give up using the computer.
I built a new machine (a Dell AIO workstation) for her with Ubuntu, FTM and a few other things.
I've found games running in Proton to provide better long-term compatibility than many native games. Despite Steam providing a stable runtime for native games, I have a few titles from their first major Linux push back in the '10s that are now crash-happy or exhibit substantial performance problems, but work perfectly fine when I use the Windows version with Proton.
Telling people not to even think about using their favorite piece of software is a good way to make sure they don't consider switching. A lot of popular Windows apps run perfectly fine in WINE. I've been using foobar2000 in it for a decade at this point, and have yet to find a native alternative that gives me the same feature set. So why shouldn't I keep running it?
> provide better long-term compatibility than many native games
This is one of the big, but less obvious, benefits to Wine/Proton. Games with native Linux builds run into all kinds of distro-specific issues that you don't really get on Windows. It's an issue for new games and an even worse issue for older games that aren't being updated anymore. Just look at Steam on macOS to see how big of an issue this is - so many games are not compatible on the latest Macs because they were built for x86 (32-bit).
Just to be clear: I consider it to be a good idea to write native apps for GNU/Linux, but first stabilize the APIs so that they stay basically stable for at least 20 years.
This is mostly a UX problem. Many ways to shoot yourself in the foot. Maybe someone could write a linter for checking symbol tables for depending on shared libraries not in the Steam runtime and private symbol use.
But also, compiling everything with dynamic libraries is kind of an interesting side effect of having all the source code in a single context of a distribution; maybe you should always statically compile if you're not part of this system.
>
But also, compiling everything with dynamic libraries is kind of an interesting side effect of having all the source code in a single context of a distribution
Under Windows, this is also done. But there is a difference: changes in a system-wide DLL better are really backwards-compatible.
If there are breaking changes, a new "package" gets introduced with new names for the DLLs. This is why on many Windows systems, lots of versions of, for example, the "Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable" are installed. Nevertheless, the old versions are still available and get maintained for a very long time at least with respect to security fixes.
Also, the API design under Windows tends to be much more "future-proof". For example, a lot of data structures contain some size information as a first field so that the API can detect which "version" of a data structure has been passed so that future changes can be implemented in a backwards-compatible manner, e.g. WNDCLASSEXA:
> My recommendation for happiness with Linux is: Always use native apps. Don’t use WINE. Don’t try to be compatible to inherent hostile things. Don’t use VMs. And especially don’t use Dual-Boot. It sucks.
This is terrible advice. Many people want to use Windows apps while using Linux, and Wine works just fine for that. And for those few that don't work in Wine, dual boot works great.
> My recommendation for happiness with Linux is: Always use native apps. Don’t use WINE. Don’t try to be compatible to inherent hostile things. Don’t use VMs. And especially don’t use Dual-Boot. It sucks.
Had I listened to your recommendation, I would've never tried Linux.
Sorry, but Linux doesn't run Photoshop. Or Valorant. Or certain VPNs, certain educational software, and doesn't work with a bunch of hardware.
Dual booting is still a hell of a lot better than trying to configure Wine in most cases, but if doing everything natively on Linux was an option, it would've have taken SteamOS so many years to become even remotely usable. And even then people install Windows on their Steam Decks to run certain specific programs or games.
For the same reason native Linux isn't an option, native macOS wouldn't have been an option back when I first tried Linux. And even today, programs like Paint.NET are dearly missed on Linux and macOS (yes, I know about Pinta), and stock macOS is infuriating to use without all manner of tools and background programs reminding me of my XP. I use Windows for my Windows tools, Linux most of the time, and macOS for my macOS work stuff. I'm not getting rid of either non-Linux OS because that would make doing certain things simply impossible.
WINE has basically become a gaming wrapper at this point. There are not many (modern) apps outside of games that run on WINE. However, games run great!
Last I checked, Office 365 didn't work, Basically anything modern Adobe didn't work, even the latest version of Visual Studio (not VSCode) didn't work. Things may have changed, I just learned to live without that stuff.
A niche Wine does suit well is running audio plugins for music production.
Wouldn't have believed it if I didn't first see and then use it myself.
Think it's because JUCE is relatively well-supported on Wine and natively on Linux, there are hardly any dependencies outside of system libraries and a DSP library.
Yeah, it's pretty mind-blowing how well this works, even though the setup was a bit janky.
Sadly, after moving my music production setup from Windows to Linux, I'm locked out of some of my expensive sample libraries because while the plugins run fine, the licensing programs do not. Very frustrating.
That's because all those apps are purposefully hostile and actively do everything in their power to make sure they don't work without their authorization.
Solution: don't use those apps and maybe people will learn. Eventually, apps and technologies like this die in our digital landscape. Rest in piece Flash, you will be missed. 3D max and Photoshop, you're next.
Real solution (for now): just don't give these assholes money. If you need to run the software, fine, but at least have the decency to steal it.
Let’s be real, this “real solution” is a teenager in the basement solution. I’m not going to steal commercial software that I use to produce my own commercial work.
I happily pay Autodesk their stupid $600 a year because I get that much value out of the application and then some.
This idea that they are purposefully hostile because they don’t want you to steal their commercial product, or they don’t support an operating system with 2% marketshare is ridiculous. I totally understand why they don’t support Linux. It’s my choice to use an incompatible system.
> happily pay Autodesk their stupid $600 a year because I get that much value out of the application and then some.
Yes, you will, but big picture: eventually the software will die.
Software isn't just a product, it's an extension of education and expression. Using paid-for commercial software is risky.
What happens is young, aspiring professionals get taught that software, and then it's ripped from their hands because of the price. A lot of these young professionals give up or, more likely, switch to OS alternatives. And they make up the industry of the future. Eventually, the commercial product is pushed out because it can't keep up.
But even if this doesn't happen, the product still dies. Because commercial software is ultimately held hostage. The BEST CASE scenario is you're eventually bled dry and squeezed. The common scenario is that the software disappears or isn't popular anymore, and you've lost hundreds of hours of skills.
This even happens in dev spaces.
If you chose COM+ for an application, you fucked up. You're stuck with it and it's painfully behind, well, everything.
Or maybe you were seduced by how cool Oracle is. And it was... 20 years ago. Now, it's not a competitive database. But you're stuck paying for it. Had you just used MySQL or Postgres from the beginning, this wouldn't have happened.
And then flash. Oh flash. Great technology, but it doesn't matter. The world moves on. If you chose flash for your website, you fucked up.
And now 3D max. I give it 10 years. Blender is already ahead of it and all the professionals of tomorrow have jumped ship.
If a better open source alternative to Autodesk Fusion comes around I'll certainly use it. I'm not saying that I'm against OSS or getting better software for free. I'm just saying that there's a $820 billion global market of software that's obviously worth paying for, and I'm going to pay for software if it fits my budget and is the best choice for me.
If all proprietary software that dared to charge a fee was destined to “die” this very forum wouldn’t exist.
If you think companies like Oracle are going to die, go ahead and short their stock. Better start selling your S&P 500 and QQQ shares. Oracle has just about doubled in the last year. Good luck!
> If all proprietary software that dared to charge a fee was destined to “die” this very forum wouldn’t exist.
I don't follow. All proprietary software IS destined to die.
Even extremely popular proprietary software. Windows 10? That's destined to die. iOS 14? Destined to die.
It's inevitable. If you're lucky, the overlords making the software will give you a new alternative. Hopefully the new alternative has all the functionality and isn't 100x more expensive.
But OS doesn't work this way, because it can be forked.
The way it works is that, in the beginning, proprietary software is really good compared to OS. As time goes on, the proprietary software rots.
It either stays the same, obsolences, or actively gets worse. Usually the last one. OS software, by comparison, gets better and better. Eventually they intersect, and if you chose the proprietary tree, you lost.
Is it not possible for open source software to die by not having any interest or maintainers? Is it not possible for open source software with no forks to be taken offline forever because the creator decided to take it down?
I thought when you were making the argument that all proprietary software is destined to die that you were actually making a real argument to say that it will die because it will become inferior to open source software that customers will prefer.
But no, actually, you’re making a completely pointless argument about how a specific version of software will die because it has been surpassed by a future version of it, and you’re just cynically assuming that all proprietary software eventually gets worse, that you’ll actually want to go back to an old version and fork it to maintain it.
But this argument is just plain false for a lot of people who use that software. No, my Autodesk isn’t going to “die” because it’s updated monthly and I can’t use the old version, just like a McDonald’s doesn’t “die” because the hamburger I ate from them yesterday doesn’t exist anymore.
Wine is great for running the old versions of stuff that weren't shackled to the cloud. Adobe and MS Office versions from ~2013 or so work great, and are more than enough of an escape hatch when native tools don't quite cut it.
A simple input switch can be had cheap, but I spent some time last year looking into KVM switches and came away feeling it was not worth the investment. Perhaps I've been misled? I read a lot of issues with cheap ones and the high quality ones cost more than just buying a monitor that supports multiple connections and switching itself.
I’ve never felt compelled to use a KVM, probably because my use cases just don’t call for it. I have a monitor stand that has a bunch of USB-A/C ports, and HDMI port, and can run power in via USB-C. I have my keyboard, mouse, and one monitor plugged into it along with a Bluetooth dongle and my webcam.
My main use is work, so I plug in the dock’s C cable and then my second monitor to the laptop HDMI. When I want to switch to my desktop I just unplug the USB-C from the laptop and pop it in the top of my tower.
Back when I had more free reign on my work laptop, I used Synergy to use them both at the same time but that was mostly so I could do “x personal thing” on my desktop while responding to Slack all using the same keyboard and mouse - without it I have to just stretch a little to the laptop keyboard.
I like using two identical miniPC's, one for each monitor.
Well, actually each monitor has two inputs and each PC two display outputs, and I had a couple extra cables so they are cross-connected too but that's besides the point.
Seems like RDP is almost intended to work like this from the beginning. Deficiencies are a lot easier to tweak side-by-side too.
Decades ago I just had to accept that a key purpose of introducing multi-partitioning to HDD's was so that multibooting from a single HDD would be extremely straightforward. And once set up, very closely mimics the hardware behavior of having a dedicated HDD or SSD for each of Windows and Linux, on the same PC.
Previously, with two different HDD's connected, each completely unaware of the other one upon power-up, when you reboot you can always use the motherboard's built-in BIOS boot menu to choose when you want to boot to a drive other than the one designated as the default choice.
That way there is nothing related to Windows on the Linux HDD at all, and nothing having to do with Linux on the Windows HDD. You can physically remove either drive before powering up and everything works completely dedicated to a single OS as expected, because each HDD is complete including its own boot files, exactly the same as it is in a non-multibooting arrangement.
As long as each HDD is capable of booting on its own, you choose the one you want, and that's the one that boots.
Well it actually took a while in the '90's before most motherboards had a built-in BIOS bootmenu to choose between different HDD's, but this feature became universal so users wouldn't have to physically reconnect their intended boot drive to the Primary Master cable. Which was the only bootable connection before the BIOS bootmenu made Secondary-connected HDD's as bootable as Primaries, your choice. You don't really have to get the most out of the electronics, but some things like this are really nice to have.
Now this was the time when it got real fancy, and both Windows and Linux bootloaders were crafted to accommodate "chainloading" from a Primary HDD to a non-Primary, so physical reconnection would not be necessary to accomplish the same behavior. This was ideal for all the remaining motherboards at the time which were not issued with a BIOS bootmenu. This is where you start to get a mixture of Windows and Linux on the same HDD, at least in the boot files. It doesn't have to be confusing, but it can be.
Once one set of boot files can boot either OS from any HDD, then each HDD no longer needs its own boot files, however that also means that those HDDs not having boot files would not boot if they are the only HDD connected.
I say the BIOS bootmenu is the fundamental that is best not abstracted too far.
Fortunately, multibooting to various SSD's using one single (Linux) bootloader [0] can be configured to have the same hardware workflow as choosing separate HDD's through the motherboard bootmenu.
And to be the most consistent I like to use the same workflow to choose from multiple partitions whether they are on the same HDD or not.
Now you can figure it's all moot, with separate miniPC's for Windows and Linux. Which really could be considered more of a luxury than multibooting a single-drive PC at will, and even more versatile than having two SSD's in the same PC.
But wait a minute, each one of these drives on each PC is a massive multibooter . . .
[0] The Windows bootloader works as always on MBR-layout SSD's on PC's supporting traditional BIOS mode, but still too defective under UEFI, where Microsoft drops the ball completely since Windows 8 in the key area of multibooting Linux. Which for decades was as easy as intended by the hardware design. But negative progress is accepted as progress by those who are supposed to be experts, as we have been convinced.
Most office workers are not in software so most work machines are office machines. Having baseline Windows further encumbered by often-misguided IT approaches.
Every one of these needs more intense tweaking before it will run as well as the same offices 20 years ago.
Too bad most users are locked out and IT may not know how to do it or may not be motivated anyway.
It may even be at the point where less tweaking may now be needed for Linux to become a higher-performance office machine than Windows/Office was 20 years ago. With less undocumented effort than it would take to get the same performance from the latest Windows. But who's going to do it?
All other things are not being equal though, 20 years ago PC's were lower-performing hardware in a number of ways, so that probably should be brought under consideration.
I don't know about this project, but using KVM+Qemu w/ VFIO lets you partition USB devices (and most other physical assets) to your virtualized OS. I used to pass my mouse back and forth between Windows and Linux this way, and similarly for one monitor (mainly to demonstrate I could indeed run Crysis).
Most of them. Kate, KDE's default editor (I use this on Kubuntu; it's nice). GNOME Text Editor, GNOME's default. Vim, for terminal use. Plenty of others.
This! Does it render Windows‘ windows individually on the Linux desktop, with integration into alt-tab, the Ubuntu dock etc. or does it just render one big VM window?
How is that not shown on the site.
It's definitely neat and the UX is kinda slick... I tried it last weekend. Unfortunately, even basic usage seemed to fail. Launching Edge browser would create a window that was frozen, and no apparent way to recover.. closing left the outline in place, and there were issues with the integration itself. Trying to connect the "Desktop" option seemed to freeze. I was able to connect to the session via the integrated web view, it looked to be asking to allow the rdp connection.
I really didn't dig in any deeper than that... didn't match the use case my SO needed, so wound up having to revert back to Windows on her laptop.
I do hope it gets better... maybe with some more app/system integration on the Windows side of things.
What's her use case, if you don't mind me asking? Because a lot of Windows apps do work fine in Wine (some may require additional tweaks), so perhaps that could be an option.
She is trying to use the TikTok streaming studio, or whatever it is called... I tried to get the Android version running via Waydroid and tried the WinBoat setup. Neither worked and after a couple hours of trying and the nagging, I just installed Windows 11 again as requested and handed the laptop back. I'm no longer tech support for that device.
Later found out, could have done some rigging to get OBS working with it, but I think that would have been too far beyond her comfort zone anyway. Having to run a shell script to plug into OBS on top of using OBS itself. (Going to avoid further ranting and stop now)
Edit: to be clear, I didn't get the app installed in WinBoat as I didn't get passed the limitation that Edge wouldn't load properly. Just with that hiccup I determined it was unfit for her usage... that isn't even getting into the potential issue(s) with mic/camera access.
An actual explanation of what the software does, from their Github repo
> WinBoat is an Electron app which allows you to run Windows apps on Linux using a containerized approach. Windows runs as a VM inside a Docker container, we communicate with it using the WinBoat Guest Server to retrieve data we need from Windows. For compositing applications as native OS-level windows, we use FreeRDP together with Windows's RemoteApp protocol.
The docker container hosts QEMU and the docker files to run Windows. The author probably chose this method because the dockur/windows project basically automates and simplifies the whole process of installing and configuring QEMU, and installing and configuring Windows etc.
Absolutely love seeing these projects that put a friendly face on amazing open source software so people can more easily run Linux and use the software they still need to..
Any similar work underway to get macOS apps running on Linux?
I wish it was possible to see macOS running well on Linux, but there are a lot of loopholes to jump through to make that happen.
1. Apple makes running their software on non-Mac hardware illegal
2. For all the hate Windows gets, virtualizing it to run all over the place is normal and expected by industry at large… the same is only becoming recently true for macOS
3. There is a strong financial interest at Apple to get in the way of this as much as possible
4. Apple is trying to reinvent Docker so people stop using Docker on their Mac’s with their native “Apple Containers” implementation
Due to this… I foresee it taking a while for this to become common for mac apps + Linux
For some values of "well". No GPU acceleration means it's incredibly sluggish and plagued with rendering issues. There's also some sort of incompatibility around clock sources, which can result in the VM crashing during startup if you assign more than one core to it. There are ways around it but if you're unlucky enough they result in a massive perf hit.
a bit off-topic, but how do you like the framework chromebook? Very seriously considering one. I have several frameworks running Fedora, but my daughter really wants a chromebook...
I really like it actually. It's a powerhouse with 64G RAM and NVME.
Crostini and Android apps make it really versatile. I run the dev channel and there are all kinds of interesting features and experiments to play with. Arch instead of Debian for crostini.
Was really disappointed when framework discontinued it, but it seems like chromeos is converging into Android.
The flip side is that we now have crostini for Android. Chromeos android subsystem has not been updated to be able run it if you are wondering, heh.
macOS doesn't support doing rootless RDP with macOS apps. If you're going to be using a full desktop anyway, skip RDP entirely and use an accelerated graphics view.
> [Flatpak, Podman?]: This is on our to-do list, but it'll take some effort because Flatpak is pretty isolated from the rest of the system and apps, so we'd have to find a way to expose installed apps, the Docker binary, and the Docker socket, and many other utilities
Vinegar wraps WINE in a Flatpak.
The vscode flatpak works with podman-remote packaged at a flatpak too; or you can call `host-spawn` or `flatpak-spawn` like there's no container/flatpak boundary there.
Nested rootless containers do work somehow; presumably with nested /etc/subuids for each container?
Distrobox passes a number of flags necessary to run GUI apps in rootless containers with Podman. Unfortunately the $XAUTHORITY path varies with each login on modern systemd distros.
Ive been on DOS and Windows since the 80's... Recently I was mainly using Windows 10 LTSC, but now I'm finally transitioning to Linux Mint as my daily driver.. It's just so *good* .. The functionality, ease of use, and "just works" aspects of it are better than any other OS imo. It shows what can happen when a small team works with the goal of just making the OS good and giving it as much functionality as possible vs when a giant corp works on it with all sorts of random goals and agendas.
I am a game dev and avid gamer, so that was the only thing keeping me on Windows, but with stuff like Wine, Bottles, Proton, Lutris, + stuff like this coming out that reason is fading away.
I’m also an 80s DOS user. Commodore actually before that. And yes Linux Mint is the standout. There are people in the Linux community though that resist it for various reasons. It’s like trying to round up cats.
I read all of the comments here and I see an awful lot of people that stand on their heads to avoid using Windows, yet it seems they want what Windows offers.
I’ve used many distro’s over the decades. But for a user, Mint is the best. Unfortunately for someone who is anti-Windows, it’s also the closest thing to a Windows clone!
I refuse to dual boot and run all of the emulation software. But what killed it for me was the most popular competitive games. The most advanced anti-cheat software that keeps gaming fun from cheaters is only on Windows. So that’s what I use exclusively. Those more effective anti-cheat mechanisms are never going to be on Linux. Windows is increasingly going to be where it’s at for desktop gaming unless a guy wants to move over to consoles. There’s just no real answer for this.
If anyone from the project reads this:please don't load Discord on the front page of your website.
Discord is often used as C2 server, and in many secure environments will trigger alerts when someone tries to load it. So loading your webpage triggers an alert (luckily the alert in our business come to me, but the point stands).
The rule of thumb is if you can use Linux and you don't have a very weird niche application that only runs on Windows, then you should migrate to Linux. There are plenty of good entry-level distributions and all sorts of applications too. Sooner or later, Windows will be abandonware with all the BS they will integrate, from always online to AI scanning all your files, so be proactive. I think even macOS is better than Windows in the current day, and you don't need a fortune too. The other day I found a mid-2012 MacBook Pro for $15 at the thrift store, installed 16GiB RAM and an SSD that I both had around, and installed the latest Sequoia with OpenCore Legacy Patcher, and voila, works just like new!
Until that day, there unfortunately ARE niche applications. Fieldworks Language Explorer (aka FLEx) is software developed by SIL Inc for doing linguistic fieldwork (dictionaries, text, grammars, parsing...) in minority languages. There's nothing like it. There was a Linux version, but they ran out of funding; I've used it, but reportedly there are major bugs.
FLEx won't run under Wine, but I'll be trying this WinBoat to see if it works.
(You may have heard of SIL's fonts, which they also make freely available. The fonts work for a huge variety of scripts, including the Nasta'liq Arabic style that other fonts don't touch, and Burmese, which from a writing standpoint is truly crazy.)
The problem is that some of these niche Windows-only applications rely on drivers that are only available for Windows. In which case, migrating to Linux is challenging at best and impossible at worst.
Their FAQ mentions the Looking Glass Indirect Display Driver (IDD). That is something to look forward to. Looking Glass will work with an iGPU setup once IDD is released (but no 3D acceleration).
What Looking Glass managed to do was get video memory sharing to work between the guest Windows compositor and a client running on the host (with qemu). Unfortunately, it apparently requires an out-of-tree Linux kernel driver that they call kvmfr. You can apparently still share non-video memory without kvmfr, which may hopefully yield adequate performance.
I always used a Virtual Box VM for Office. After giving this a quick try, I'm impressed. The dockered VM is much less bloated then a normal Windows install, and somehow running the apps via a local RDP connection is significantly smoother than the Virtual Box graphics stack.
WinBoat seems interesting. I will be keeping my eye on this one.
Since I started using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) in the last couple of years.. especially at work.. my work has been more productive, running certain GUI apps that "appear" to be running on Windows. There are some odd quirks to it, but its decent. On top of this, I can run podman or use shell tools (and bash)
However, I was wondering what the opposite equiverlant would be in linux land. I mean, I rarely use Windows Applications when on a Linux machine. In the past, I remember playing GTA:Vice City through Wine and was 98% awesome. Just a few missing images and thats it. Other than this, I've had little reason to use Windows applications on Linux.
Recently, I always wondered if there would be a "Linux Subsystem for Windows" equiverlant, abling to run pretty much any app. It would give my daughter the upperhand, which I recently installed Debian on her laptop... but I know there will be some Schoolwork with Microsoft products... WinBoat might be the answer.
By default, yes, but they can all be supported, with some manual work, depending on your exact scenario. Check r/vfio if you're interested.
Anti-cheat can be a hit-or-miss depending on the game, but for many games you can edit the VM XML to simulate real hardware. But of course you may not want to do that if you don't want to risk getting banned. Personally I don't play such user-hostile games that employ malware-like anticheat (and neither should you, if you care about privacy and security), but that's a whole other debate.
They don't need to "work" on Wayland support at all, all that work is being done by the FreeRDP project.
Also, sdl3-freerdp is the new Wayland client for FreeRDP is already available, and it works fine. You can just edit the shortcuts/bash scripts and replace xfreerdp with sdl3-freerdp and bam, you've got Wayland support.
Edit: yes it does! See the README.md of the project on GitHub:
> Elegant Interface: Sleek and intuitive interface that seamlessly integrates Windows into your Linux desktop environment, making it feel like a native experience
It would be worthwhile to mention Proton IMO. Actually, without GPU pass through (yet, at least) I guess they are not even going after the same use-case anyway. It is just the other obvious comparison after Wine.
Basically yes, although WinApps uses a VM directly (and requires you to set it up first), whereas this project uses the dockur/windows container which automates the whole setup, making it easier for newbies.
Technical users are probably better off spinning up their own VM though.
Sure, Wine when it works. It doesn't always, and it looks like this WinBoat will work when Wine doesn't. I'm currently using it for SIL's Fieldworks Language Explorer, which did not run under Wine.
Is this Parallels Desktop but for Linux? If so, this could be interesting however, what about graphics intensive applications? What does this offer that Proton or Wine doesn’t solve?
For graphics intensive apps, you can get GPU passthrough working with some effort[1] but it's not really end-user friendly.
Also, I wouldn't say it's an alternative to Proton, in fact it's probably worse than Proton because of the limited refresh rate, colors, and added latency of the RDP protocol that it uses to display the desktop.
But it can be an alternative to Wine, since you're able to run certain apps that can't run in Wine, like Office 365, Adobe etc. This is where it shines, for people who are dependent on productivity apps like Office.
Well yes, it runs Excel in a VM running Windows. Which means you need an extra Windows license to be able to do it legally, but other than that, it works...
Not only a license, but I’m kind of still seeing that you would need to run your Windows VM with the entire range of Microsoft updates, defender, antivirus, and monitoring if your corporate, etc.
Are apps run through WinBoat limited to 60hz like regular Windows VMs? I’ve gotten to used to higher refresh rates and 1 window being a lower rate drives me nuts!
This looks nice, WinBoat gives teams a simple way to use linux for everyone, without losing access to Windows apps when needed. There’s no need for fancy cloud setups or switching between lots of devices—just one system and quick access to what works.
Onboarding is easier for everyone, and IT does less work with only one setup to care for. This means companies can pick what’s best without making things messy or complicated.
For what you're describing, there are already Enterprise-grade solutions that's even simpler and more robust, such as Azure Virtual Desktop with RemoteApps, and the even more mature and battle-tested Citrix XenApps / Cloud.
Like for my work, I use a Linux laptop, and access our Windows-only apps and environments via Citrix and it works really well. And a good chunk of our apps are cloud-based anyways so we just need a web browser to access them.
I also own a MacBook and have an Android phone, and I can access my work environment from all my devices. So at least for our workplace, the end-user OS has been largely irrelevant.
This reads like AI and almost none of it makes sense. Why would a Windows desktop fleet be more heterogeneous than a Linux one? Why would Linux be an easier on-boarding experience?
Orgs use Windows because non-technical users expect it and execs don't get fired for choosing Microsoft.
Onboarding non-technical people to a computer that’s running half the apps in a different is virtualized and all the things that can go wrong with that sounds a nightmare.
How you gonna justify buying a windows license for each user and then not just using that and forcing them to use some interface they’re unfamiliar with.
I get the vision but ultimately if they need to run windows apps for work, just have them run windows.
There’s places where people should consider Linux but that isn’t one of them.
This is exactly what the Looking Glass project is working on, their next release is expected to include their Indirect Display Driver that pretty much solves all the graphics limitations of RDP, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg50X9w5llI
It's just a VM running full Windows. It doesn't provide any win32 APIs or ways to interact with them, besides creating shortcuts to apps inside Windows using RDP/FreeRDP's RemoteApp functionality.
I mean, great. I've never actually tried since going all in on Linux. Figured I'd just abandon the Windows world. This would be useful though.
Does anyone here actually do this, with Winboat or any other tool? Every time I've tried it's been too flaky to be worthwhile, but it's been a good few years.
I get documents from a variety of clients that use Office, and often get spreadsheets that have to work without any bugs or surprises. It also helps when I'm screensharing to use tools people are familiar with.
The final reason is that I hate having to redo my resume, which I made originally as a .docx that doesn't render well outside of Word. Even between Word versions it fucks up. I'm soft-locked in.
It's a full VM running via Docker. The Windows apps are presented via RDP's RemoteApps protocol via FreeRDP.
There's also WinApps, which is the same thing but without the docker container, and it supports a remote VM as well: https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps
WinBoat uses Docker (specifically the dockur/windows container) to simplify the backend setup. The Docker container hosts QEMU and all the configs to automate the whole "create a VM, configure it, install Windows, configure it etc" process.
Some of y’all are acting like this dude personally insulted you.
They put out an open source project for folks to use that may solve a problem for someone out there. That’s neat. If it has faults maybe we can be a bit more constructive and less all “wtf is this crap?”
This is just a Windows VM with extra tooling. Makes it look slick, doesn't make it "Windows apps on Linux".
Similar projects exist for gaming for example Looking Glass, which also uses a Windows VM on KVM (the "Windows in Docker" thing is a bit of a lie, Windows doesn't run in the container, Windows runs on KVM on the host kernel).
UX wise, this is similar to RAIL.
That's not to say that this isn't neat, but it's also not something new (we still have two flavours: API simulation/re-implementation and running the OS [windows]). If this was a new, third flavour, that would be quite the news (in-place ABI translation?).
And I had to come here to find out what it actually was. Why don't project pages ever actually tell you what it is, what it does and how it does it?
Half the time it's something like "Plorglewurzle leverages your big data block chain to provide sublinear microservices to Azure Cloud infrastructures"
At least this one kind of shows you having to install Windows.
I call this the "marketing website problem".
Unfortunately many companies have realized that engineers don't make purchasing decisions. (Mearly suggestions) Rather, C-Suite, who knows nothing about the technical side of things, and everything about the buzzword side, makes the decisions. As a result, companies know that if they just throw a bunch of inflated marketing mumbo-jumbo at the user, while it will turn off every engineer asking "WTF does this actually do and how does it work", some C-Suite will run out and purchase it without asking, then force their entire team to use it because it "produces synergy of the AI block chain and big data cloud APIs while enhancing productivity". Then us Engineers are stuck using it, whether we wanted it or not.
Agree. Have even seen too many companies whose main product completely avoids such questions. I don’t get it.
Must be why I’m not wealthy. I always figured one would have to show people a reason why they should give boat loads of money…
> Must be why I’m not wealthy. I always figured one would have to show people a reason why they should give boat loads of money…
This one hit hard. It turns out Phineas Barnum was right this whole time.
> Why don't project pages ever actually tell you what it is
If it's a good thing with substance, they do.
If they don't, don't use it. This usually hints at a broken culture/missing substance. It _can_ also be ineptitude, but that too is not your problem but theirs.
You woke up this morning not having the problem this sets out to solve. You can go to sleep and rest easily this night, knowing that you still don't have whatever problem this sets out to solve.
If you should one day wake up and notice that you have a problem this could solve, you will find yourself googling for a solution, again side-stepping this whole marketing nonsense.
I was complaining about this sort of thing in another thread.
Missed opportunity to call it "Linux Subsystem for Windows", or LSW in short.
I think this name would be confusing. For one - it is for linux, not windows.And it is a subsystem running Windows. So, it should be called Windows Subsystem for Linux, or WSL.
You might be missing context here.
There is a feature of Windows called “Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)” already that basically does the inverse of this (windows host, Linux VM).
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL
The feature is a windows subsystem (for running Linux).
I think this may be a woosh moment where they're saying the Microsoft version should be called LSW because it's for Windows. Probably sounds more obvious with a more sarcastic tone
The concept of a "subsystem" in Windows has evolved since the operating system's inception when Windows NT was designed to support multiple operating system environments through distinct subsystems. Win32 subsystem, which features case-insensitive filenames and device files in every directory, and the POSIX subsystem, which supports case-sensitive filenames and centralized device files: Windows subsystem, the Subsystem for Unix-based Applications (SUA), and the Native subsystem for kernel-mode code were the main subsystems at first.
/SUBSYSTEM linker switch was used to specify the target subsystem at compile time, enabling applications to be compiled for different environments such as console applications, EFI boot environments, or native system processes.
In this nomenclature, WSL follows the original naming conventions (although SUA should have been called WSUA).
Watch out. You are explaining serious stuff under a comment that was essentially "watch out, your parent comment was sarcasm".
Sure, but a little education is useful as background is often lost.
I do love this sort of nerd talk!
Except WSL doesn't actually use any of the nt subsystem machinery in either of its incarnations.
And also, it doesn't really follow that nomenclature. Those all follow "user code target" Subsystem. Windows Subsystem, OS/2 Subsystem, Posix Subsystem, etc.
that's the joke!
Jokes are supposed to be funny.
Not everybody can afford a humour bypass, good surgeons are hard to come by.
If wine was LSW1 than this is LSW2
I think this is accurate. WSL v1 did not use a VM, just like Wine. However both WSL v1 and Wine struggled with compatibility issues. WSL 2 gave up and used a VM instead. You pay a performance penalty but compatibility issues mostly go away.
Well, I discrepe a lot with the "compatibility issues" of Wine... Essentially when sometimes can run better and with less issues legacy software that modern Windows.
Example: My company uses MS Teams for meetings. Wine cannot run it reliably.
Counter example: my windows 10 machine can't play my copy of crysis, but my Ubuntu machine can under wine.
It's literally just dockur/windows:latest + FreeRDP rootless mode + a small daemon that runs in the VM that tells you what apps are installed via an API.
If you don't want the latter part, you'd be better served with the dockur/windows image + FreeRDP
I believe Cassowary (https://github.com/casualsnek/cassowary) is an older tool that does pretty much this.
My experience with it is that FreeRDP in rootless mode isn't very good for Windows applications that do anything special with window borders. Using Office and many other programs became a pain.
When it worked, it worked really well, though. Reminds me of the same feature that VMWare used to offer many years ago for running XP/Vista programs on Windows 7 through a VM.
can you do "pass a single window" with freeRDP? I haven't actually seen that before so forgive me for asking.
This project looks like it does that, but I could be wrong.
Yes, it's rootless mode. FreeRDP only works with X11, so it runs in Xwayland and the integration isn't as smooth as it could be.
It's reminiscent of rootless mode in Parallels, just as janky, too.
This is incorrect. FreeRDP has supported Wayland since a long time via their `wlfreerdp` client - which is now deprecated, Wayland support is now available via their `sdl3-freerdp` client. The SDL client was alpha quality a couple of years ago, but as of the last couple of recent releases, it's been pretty decent. I'm unsure though if its reached full feature parity yet with the X11 client.
Thanks for pointing this out, you have just made my life easier
Spoke a little too soon, can't seem to get rootless mode working with sdl-freerdp3 in the latest kwin_wayland, but desktop mode works
> can you do "pass a single window" with freeRDP?
That's what "rootless" mode does.
and with MS making sure you have to sign in with a MS account... i dont really see the point of this.
> MS making sure you have to sign in with a MS account
if you are capable of running linux, you're capable of working out the various ways to bypass that sign-in "requirement".
But if using hello@example.com as the email, and using F10 and oobe or whateve command you pulled off Google stop working, and then you have to move to more exotic options, like downloading programs to modify disk images to prepare a USB drive to install an LTSP or IoT copy of windows 10 it's all just such a waste of time to do something that should be easy all because someone at Microsoft got on this kick that what they want is more important than what the customer wants. It's so frustrating!
You basically need to do that anyway, because defaults are janky.
As a non-coder/engineer Linux user…I’ll admit that’s actually not obvious to me. Linux is trivially easy to run these days.
I could probably drop my dad in Mint and he’d assume windows just looks different. Maybe that’s a tad facetious but also ehhhh I could maybe get away with it
Only the home version has that issue.
Exactly the same thing of WSL2
In-place ABI translation is how wine works, what do you mean?
Let me guess. When it gets tricky it fails. USB? Own IP? 3D? Bluetooth?
My recommendation for happiness with Linux is: Always use native apps. Don’t use WINE. Don’t try to be compatible to inherent hostile things. Don’t use VMs. And especially don’t use Dual-Boot. It sucks.
Basically migrate and go full Linux. Don’t look back :)
Proton (which is WINE derivative) works somehow, because Valve invests every single day tremendous efforts into it. But that’s the problem, tremendous efforts.
The good news. Every bit invested in high quality API/ABI on Linux pays off. Valve contributions to MESA and amdgpu are invaluable. Valve should honor native AAA-Titles and Indie-Titles for Linux - with exclusive Steam Awards. There is awesome stuff like Unrailed. Make the game developers think:
PS: I missed Counter-Strike so much on Linux for years. And the Valve came, ported everything natively, and it is wonderful :)PPS: I use a Mac for two incompatible applications (Garmin Express and Zwift). Less maintenance than Windows. Less possibilities than Linux. Horrible file-browser. Window management is a pain. But it covers the gap without ruining my day. I have to admit, the Mac cannot run Counter-Strike 2. That’s a task for Linux :)
Bad advice. Counterpoint: Wine works really well (especially for old applications) and there's nothing wrong with using it. If people restrict themselves to arbitrary rules then many won't be able to use Linux.
Ask IBM how "OS/2 For Windows" turned out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2
There is value in those who push by absolutes like this; they are moving the world in their direction; it's important to the market to have some edge-zealots on the demand side. Helps prevent monopoly and is an at-large benefit.
Disclosure: I'm 100% Linux since 2005 (except embed devices (game console, Roku)). All the Line-of-Business stuff "just works".
Long time WINE user. It did break so often. I did run Counter-Strike and other software, and usually an update ruined it. Because? It is not supported. The programmers don’t care about WINE and Linux.
The setup is usually a pain and needs workarounds. Same for weird SMB or Exchange stuff. It is a hell. The admin changes a setting and you’re in trouble.
It was fixed with the native port of Counter-Strike. Exchange was fixed by EU regulation. The other applications found better native replacements. I’m giving you the advice because the “hacker ideology” doesn’t help users. Users need reliability and defined behavior. The users itself can influence that by using compatible software and APIs. And by requesting it. And we need to pay for it.
Don’t lock back. Don’t stay in a hostile relationship. The same advice applies to government agencies or companies. Prepare. Clean cut.
PS: As mentioned I except Proton (as derivative of WINE). Valve controls Steam. Valve works permanent on fixing new issues. They could told a company to hold the update back to protect Linux.
There's a place for pushing strong philosophical points. But that's not what this comment is. This comment is practical advice, and I think it misses the point.
"Try to avoid relying on proprietary software" is strong. "Avoid any option that exists to run software you think you need" feels out of touch, especially when it says "I use Mac for X and Y" - which is barely practical: having a whole extra, expensive computer that's not maintained forever is quite the costly workaround for an arbitrary stance like "don't use Wine" that they don't motivate so much in the end (there's no practical explanation in that comment for avoiding VMs or Wine - they say maintenance, but I don't see what's hard to maintain in running Wine).
The comment argues "The good news. Every bit invested in high quality API/ABI on Linux pays off.". I do agree. I don't know about high quality, and it hurts a bit to say it, but it so happens that Windows might be the only stable API/ABI on Linux, with Wine being a completely libre reimplementation of it. If you need to write a program that you are reasonably sure will run on any Linux in 20 years without intervention, Wine might be your best bet (with AppImage probably your second best bet). What would be the fundamental (philosophical, practical, technical) reason to avoid targeting Wine? What makes winelib so different from other libraries such that you should avoid it? Genuinely curious. What real alternative is there? Qt and Gtk break the API each major version and even the GNU libc doesn't guarantee ABI stability. The only reasonable alternative is "maintained free software" (and that's what I happen to rely on).
FWIW, I have no stake in this: I use only free software, I mostly don't use Wine nor contribute to it, and I wish I were wrong.
Windows software doesn't even run on windows after a few versions. Which is why we have gog.
I mean in terms of market here, for games (largest current use case for Wine / proton). Its not really a market. I think the investment for linux over windows is for steam to try and push people away from windows so as to reduce the competition for Xbox Game Pass. In the most recent report for steam, linux users are like 2-3% of the total share. I'm not sure that "edge lords" pushing the market, really factors into valve's decision. If Xbox Game Pass goes under, then I think steam will likely reduce its investment in proton.
Just my take though, I get your point that people spreading this idea and encouraging it have a place and at least its not negative. I just don't think that they really are market movers.
Hey, but put it differently, 3% is every 30th person, so technically, they can brag about how cool and easy Linux is to their friends, who’d install it too. So while 3% sounds like a rounding error, they may shift the pretty quickly, and suddenly that’s 30% one day.
Pushing the market :)
Valve releases Half-Live 3 exclusive as Linux port only. Announces that Windows port will follow at some time undefined time.
That pushes the market. A lot of angry people will become more angry and write posts on the internet. The rest grabs an ISO and decides, that the game matters more than Win11.
That’s not crazy. That is the daily business of Windows, XBox, PlayStation and Nintendo. They even decide deliberately making new games platform exclusive for the newest console, forcing gamers into expensive upgrades for new consoles (and weirdly these people are happy about spending 500 for it).
PS: The shares of Valve will not drop. Valve is - not a stock market company - it is privately owned. That’s the reason why we nice actions from Valve, over long terms. I cannot say what will happen with Microsoft shares.
Every single wine version has regressions.
I found I was unable to install Wine due to package manager conflicts. I had only one Windows program (Everett Kaser's Hero Hearts game) that I wanted to run on Linux, so I wrote my own implementation of the game engine, which is (in my opinion) much better than the original implementation.
Flatpak and Lutris solves that.
Ok now write your own implementation of SOLIDWORKS please.
I switched my gaming desktop over to Linux last year.
My experience has mostly been that Linux native versions just aren't as good as the Windows-on-Proton version. (Shout out to Larian for their recent BG3 release, a much better native version.)
Totally agree that Proton only works so well because of the constant effort that Valve put into it.
Shouting at game devs to make better native Linux versions isn't going to work. What will work is that the market demographics are slowly moving over to Linux, mostly thanks to Valve, Proton and the Steam Deck.
In practice, the most stable API on Linux is WINE. There are of course things game devs can do to counteract this, but they won't, and WINE works amazingly well for games, so they don't need to either.
In practice all those 32 bit binaries won't run on any machine real soon.
Very often what holds you back is not a huge and complex thing like an AAA game, but something far less demanding and obscure. Something like an app to design knitting patterns, elaborate, purpose-built, and without a huge team behind it. Not open-source though. In this case, seamless compatibility is great.
(For games, there is Proton.)
For me (Well, my grandmother) it was Family Tree Maker.
To cut a very long story short - after Windows 10 restarted on her, and changed default browser and application settings too many times she was going to completely give up using the computer.
I built a new machine (a Dell AIO workstation) for her with Ubuntu, FTM and a few other things.
Worked brilliantly.
I've found games running in Proton to provide better long-term compatibility than many native games. Despite Steam providing a stable runtime for native games, I have a few titles from their first major Linux push back in the '10s that are now crash-happy or exhibit substantial performance problems, but work perfectly fine when I use the Windows version with Proton.
Telling people not to even think about using their favorite piece of software is a good way to make sure they don't consider switching. A lot of popular Windows apps run perfectly fine in WINE. I've been using foobar2000 in it for a decade at this point, and have yet to find a native alternative that gives me the same feature set. So why shouldn't I keep running it?
> provide better long-term compatibility than many native games
This is one of the big, but less obvious, benefits to Wine/Proton. Games with native Linux builds run into all kinds of distro-specific issues that you don't really get on Windows. It's an issue for new games and an even worse issue for older games that aren't being updated anymore. Just look at Steam on macOS to see how big of an issue this is - so many games are not compatible on the latest Macs because they were built for x86 (32-bit).
"Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux" - https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/
> My recommendation for happiness with Linux is: Always use native apps. Don’t use WINE. Don’t try to be compatible to inherent hostile things.
Rather: don't try to be compatible with inherently unstable APIs:
https://sporks.space/2022/02/27/win32-is-the-stable-linux-us...
https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/
Just to be clear: I consider it to be a good idea to write native apps for GNU/Linux, but first stabilize the APIs so that they stay basically stable for at least 20 years.
This is mostly a UX problem. Many ways to shoot yourself in the foot. Maybe someone could write a linter for checking symbol tables for depending on shared libraries not in the Steam runtime and private symbol use.
But also, compiling everything with dynamic libraries is kind of an interesting side effect of having all the source code in a single context of a distribution; maybe you should always statically compile if you're not part of this system.
> But also, compiling everything with dynamic libraries is kind of an interesting side effect of having all the source code in a single context of a distribution
Under Windows, this is also done. But there is a difference: changes in a system-wide DLL better are really backwards-compatible.
If there are breaking changes, a new "package" gets introduced with new names for the DLLs. This is why on many Windows systems, lots of versions of, for example, the "Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable" are installed. Nevertheless, the old versions are still available and get maintained for a very long time at least with respect to security fixes.
Also, the API design under Windows tends to be much more "future-proof". For example, a lot of data structures contain some size information as a first field so that the API can detect which "version" of a data structure has been passed so that future changes can be implemented in a backwards-compatible manner, e.g. WNDCLASSEXA:
> https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/...
The first field is cbSize.
To me, it seems in the GNU/Linux ecosystem, the API developers care a lot less about such topics.
> My recommendation for happiness with Linux is: Always use native apps. Don’t use WINE. Don’t try to be compatible to inherent hostile things. Don’t use VMs. And especially don’t use Dual-Boot. It sucks.
This is terrible advice. Many people want to use Windows apps while using Linux, and Wine works just fine for that. And for those few that don't work in Wine, dual boot works great.
> My recommendation for happiness with Linux is: Always use native apps. Don’t use WINE. Don’t try to be compatible to inherent hostile things. Don’t use VMs. And especially don’t use Dual-Boot. It sucks.
Had I listened to your recommendation, I would've never tried Linux.
Sorry, but Linux doesn't run Photoshop. Or Valorant. Or certain VPNs, certain educational software, and doesn't work with a bunch of hardware.
Dual booting is still a hell of a lot better than trying to configure Wine in most cases, but if doing everything natively on Linux was an option, it would've have taken SteamOS so many years to become even remotely usable. And even then people install Windows on their Steam Decks to run certain specific programs or games.
For the same reason native Linux isn't an option, native macOS wouldn't have been an option back when I first tried Linux. And even today, programs like Paint.NET are dearly missed on Linux and macOS (yes, I know about Pinta), and stock macOS is infuriating to use without all manner of tools and background programs reminding me of my XP. I use Windows for my Windows tools, Linux most of the time, and macOS for my macOS work stuff. I'm not getting rid of either non-Linux OS because that would make doing certain things simply impossible.
WINE has basically become a gaming wrapper at this point. There are not many (modern) apps outside of games that run on WINE. However, games run great!
Last I checked, Office 365 didn't work, Basically anything modern Adobe didn't work, even the latest version of Visual Studio (not VSCode) didn't work. Things may have changed, I just learned to live without that stuff.
A niche Wine does suit well is running audio plugins for music production.
Wouldn't have believed it if I didn't first see and then use it myself.
Think it's because JUCE is relatively well-supported on Wine and natively on Linux, there are hardly any dependencies outside of system libraries and a DSP library.
Yeah, it's pretty mind-blowing how well this works, even though the setup was a bit janky.
Sadly, after moving my music production setup from Windows to Linux, I'm locked out of some of my expensive sample libraries because while the plugins run fine, the licensing programs do not. Very frustrating.
That's because all those apps are purposefully hostile and actively do everything in their power to make sure they don't work without their authorization.
Solution: don't use those apps and maybe people will learn. Eventually, apps and technologies like this die in our digital landscape. Rest in piece Flash, you will be missed. 3D max and Photoshop, you're next.
Real solution (for now): just don't give these assholes money. If you need to run the software, fine, but at least have the decency to steal it.
Let’s be real, this “real solution” is a teenager in the basement solution. I’m not going to steal commercial software that I use to produce my own commercial work.
I happily pay Autodesk their stupid $600 a year because I get that much value out of the application and then some.
This idea that they are purposefully hostile because they don’t want you to steal their commercial product, or they don’t support an operating system with 2% marketshare is ridiculous. I totally understand why they don’t support Linux. It’s my choice to use an incompatible system.
> happily pay Autodesk their stupid $600 a year because I get that much value out of the application and then some.
Yes, you will, but big picture: eventually the software will die.
Software isn't just a product, it's an extension of education and expression. Using paid-for commercial software is risky.
What happens is young, aspiring professionals get taught that software, and then it's ripped from their hands because of the price. A lot of these young professionals give up or, more likely, switch to OS alternatives. And they make up the industry of the future. Eventually, the commercial product is pushed out because it can't keep up.
But even if this doesn't happen, the product still dies. Because commercial software is ultimately held hostage. The BEST CASE scenario is you're eventually bled dry and squeezed. The common scenario is that the software disappears or isn't popular anymore, and you've lost hundreds of hours of skills.
This even happens in dev spaces.
If you chose COM+ for an application, you fucked up. You're stuck with it and it's painfully behind, well, everything.
Or maybe you were seduced by how cool Oracle is. And it was... 20 years ago. Now, it's not a competitive database. But you're stuck paying for it. Had you just used MySQL or Postgres from the beginning, this wouldn't have happened.
And then flash. Oh flash. Great technology, but it doesn't matter. The world moves on. If you chose flash for your website, you fucked up.
And now 3D max. I give it 10 years. Blender is already ahead of it and all the professionals of tomorrow have jumped ship.
If a better open source alternative to Autodesk Fusion comes around I'll certainly use it. I'm not saying that I'm against OSS or getting better software for free. I'm just saying that there's a $820 billion global market of software that's obviously worth paying for, and I'm going to pay for software if it fits my budget and is the best choice for me.
If all proprietary software that dared to charge a fee was destined to “die” this very forum wouldn’t exist.
If you think companies like Oracle are going to die, go ahead and short their stock. Better start selling your S&P 500 and QQQ shares. Oracle has just about doubled in the last year. Good luck!
> If all proprietary software that dared to charge a fee was destined to “die” this very forum wouldn’t exist.
I don't follow. All proprietary software IS destined to die.
Even extremely popular proprietary software. Windows 10? That's destined to die. iOS 14? Destined to die.
It's inevitable. If you're lucky, the overlords making the software will give you a new alternative. Hopefully the new alternative has all the functionality and isn't 100x more expensive.
But OS doesn't work this way, because it can be forked.
The way it works is that, in the beginning, proprietary software is really good compared to OS. As time goes on, the proprietary software rots.
It either stays the same, obsolences, or actively gets worse. Usually the last one. OS software, by comparison, gets better and better. Eventually they intersect, and if you chose the proprietary tree, you lost.
Is it not possible for open source software to die by not having any interest or maintainers? Is it not possible for open source software with no forks to be taken offline forever because the creator decided to take it down?
I thought when you were making the argument that all proprietary software is destined to die that you were actually making a real argument to say that it will die because it will become inferior to open source software that customers will prefer.
But no, actually, you’re making a completely pointless argument about how a specific version of software will die because it has been surpassed by a future version of it, and you’re just cynically assuming that all proprietary software eventually gets worse, that you’ll actually want to go back to an old version and fork it to maintain it.
But this argument is just plain false for a lot of people who use that software. No, my Autodesk isn’t going to “die” because it’s updated monthly and I can’t use the old version, just like a McDonald’s doesn’t “die” because the hamburger I ate from them yesterday doesn’t exist anymore.
Wine is great for running the old versions of stuff that weren't shackled to the cloud. Adobe and MS Office versions from ~2013 or so work great, and are more than enough of an escape hatch when native tools don't quite cut it.
Agree that modern apps are hit and miss.
> Basically anything modern Adobe didn't work
Well that’s just Adobe badumtsssss
I didn't know about Pinta, and now I do. Thank you!
+1 for this, and I’ll add Autodesk to this list.
I tried everything. I tried some dude’s GitHub project to get it to work with Wine. It’s just not working for me.
Something like this seems perfect for that use case.
Wouldn't even dual boot. But a cheap mini PC and keyboard mouse monitor switch.
Done
A simple input switch can be had cheap, but I spent some time last year looking into KVM switches and came away feeling it was not worth the investment. Perhaps I've been misled? I read a lot of issues with cheap ones and the high quality ones cost more than just buying a monitor that supports multiple connections and switching itself.
I’ve never felt compelled to use a KVM, probably because my use cases just don’t call for it. I have a monitor stand that has a bunch of USB-A/C ports, and HDMI port, and can run power in via USB-C. I have my keyboard, mouse, and one monitor plugged into it along with a Bluetooth dongle and my webcam.
My main use is work, so I plug in the dock’s C cable and then my second monitor to the laptop HDMI. When I want to switch to my desktop I just unplug the USB-C from the laptop and pop it in the top of my tower.
Back when I had more free reign on my work laptop, I used Synergy to use them both at the same time but that was mostly so I could do “x personal thing” on my desktop while responding to Slack all using the same keyboard and mouse - without it I have to just stretch a little to the laptop keyboard.
You are all correct if it works for you :)
I like using two identical miniPC's, one for each monitor.
Well, actually each monitor has two inputs and each PC two display outputs, and I had a couple extra cables so they are cross-connected too but that's besides the point.
Seems like RDP is almost intended to work like this from the beginning. Deficiencies are a lot easier to tweak side-by-side too.
Decades ago I just had to accept that a key purpose of introducing multi-partitioning to HDD's was so that multibooting from a single HDD would be extremely straightforward. And once set up, very closely mimics the hardware behavior of having a dedicated HDD or SSD for each of Windows and Linux, on the same PC.
Previously, with two different HDD's connected, each completely unaware of the other one upon power-up, when you reboot you can always use the motherboard's built-in BIOS boot menu to choose when you want to boot to a drive other than the one designated as the default choice.
That way there is nothing related to Windows on the Linux HDD at all, and nothing having to do with Linux on the Windows HDD. You can physically remove either drive before powering up and everything works completely dedicated to a single OS as expected, because each HDD is complete including its own boot files, exactly the same as it is in a non-multibooting arrangement.
As long as each HDD is capable of booting on its own, you choose the one you want, and that's the one that boots.
Well it actually took a while in the '90's before most motherboards had a built-in BIOS bootmenu to choose between different HDD's, but this feature became universal so users wouldn't have to physically reconnect their intended boot drive to the Primary Master cable. Which was the only bootable connection before the BIOS bootmenu made Secondary-connected HDD's as bootable as Primaries, your choice. You don't really have to get the most out of the electronics, but some things like this are really nice to have.
Now this was the time when it got real fancy, and both Windows and Linux bootloaders were crafted to accommodate "chainloading" from a Primary HDD to a non-Primary, so physical reconnection would not be necessary to accomplish the same behavior. This was ideal for all the remaining motherboards at the time which were not issued with a BIOS bootmenu. This is where you start to get a mixture of Windows and Linux on the same HDD, at least in the boot files. It doesn't have to be confusing, but it can be.
Once one set of boot files can boot either OS from any HDD, then each HDD no longer needs its own boot files, however that also means that those HDDs not having boot files would not boot if they are the only HDD connected.
I say the BIOS bootmenu is the fundamental that is best not abstracted too far.
Fortunately, multibooting to various SSD's using one single (Linux) bootloader [0] can be configured to have the same hardware workflow as choosing separate HDD's through the motherboard bootmenu.
And to be the most consistent I like to use the same workflow to choose from multiple partitions whether they are on the same HDD or not.
Now you can figure it's all moot, with separate miniPC's for Windows and Linux. Which really could be considered more of a luxury than multibooting a single-drive PC at will, and even more versatile than having two SSD's in the same PC.
But wait a minute, each one of these drives on each PC is a massive multibooter . . .
[0] The Windows bootloader works as always on MBR-layout SSD's on PC's supporting traditional BIOS mode, but still too defective under UEFI, where Microsoft drops the ball completely since Windows 8 in the key area of multibooting Linux. Which for decades was as easy as intended by the hardware design. But negative progress is accepted as progress by those who are supposed to be experts, as we have been convinced.
Some of us have work that requires windows only applications.
Exactly
Sorry boss I can't do work today, I decided to go full Linux and our CRM doesn't support it!
You don't have a work machine?
Most office workers are not in software so most work machines are office machines. Having baseline Windows further encumbered by often-misguided IT approaches.
Every one of these needs more intense tweaking before it will run as well as the same offices 20 years ago.
Too bad most users are locked out and IT may not know how to do it or may not be motivated anyway.
It may even be at the point where less tweaking may now be needed for Linux to become a higher-performance office machine than Windows/Office was 20 years ago. With less undocumented effort than it would take to get the same performance from the latest Windows. But who's going to do it?
All other things are not being equal though, 20 years ago PC's were lower-performing hardware in a number of ways, so that probably should be brought under consideration.
But it just seems so unfair then.
100% Linux is a nice idea, but doesn't work out with some stuff, like the OBD II app for my motorcycle being windows only and needing USB access.
The vast majority of games are fine via Steam/Proton.
They will never ever receive native Linux ports.
Understand what each OS is good at. Back in my younger days, experimenting with Linux was my defacto CS education.
I use desktop Linux when I don't want distractions I need my computer to do what I want it it.
Window's is much much better for music production. I'm not switching DAWs.
Primarily I'm a .net developer, I NEED Visual Studio to really be productive.
OSX is when I have an important interview or something. Although I did interview using Fedora recently. Fantastically stable distro!
You don't take a Lambo off road, you generally don't take a Jeep to the race track.
I don't know about this project, but using KVM+Qemu w/ VFIO lets you partition USB devices (and most other physical assets) to your virtualized OS. I used to pass my mouse back and forth between Windows and Linux this way, and similarly for one monitor (mainly to demonstrate I could indeed run Crysis).
native Linux apps also fail when it gets "tricky", so this isn't really that great of a benchmark, is it?
USB passthrough works remarkably well. (No experience with winboat).
Can you recommend a reasonably lightweight text editor for linux with syntax highlighting?
Most of them. Kate, KDE's default editor (I use this on Kubuntu; it's nice). GNOME Text Editor, GNOME's default. Vim, for terminal use. Plenty of others.
Sublime
vim?
Or just use windows :)
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It's always great to see software websites without a damn screenshot of the software doing its job.
It says it can run office, maybe show me how it looks? How can you sell "seamless" and then don't demonstrate. I don't get it.
This! Does it render Windows‘ windows individually on the Linux desktop, with integration into alt-tab, the Ubuntu dock etc. or does it just render one big VM window? How is that not shown on the site.
It's definitely neat and the UX is kinda slick... I tried it last weekend. Unfortunately, even basic usage seemed to fail. Launching Edge browser would create a window that was frozen, and no apparent way to recover.. closing left the outline in place, and there were issues with the integration itself. Trying to connect the "Desktop" option seemed to freeze. I was able to connect to the session via the integrated web view, it looked to be asking to allow the rdp connection.
I really didn't dig in any deeper than that... didn't match the use case my SO needed, so wound up having to revert back to Windows on her laptop.
I do hope it gets better... maybe with some more app/system integration on the Windows side of things.
What's her use case, if you don't mind me asking? Because a lot of Windows apps do work fine in Wine (some may require additional tweaks), so perhaps that could be an option.
She is trying to use the TikTok streaming studio, or whatever it is called... I tried to get the Android version running via Waydroid and tried the WinBoat setup. Neither worked and after a couple hours of trying and the nagging, I just installed Windows 11 again as requested and handed the laptop back. I'm no longer tech support for that device.
Later found out, could have done some rigging to get OBS working with it, but I think that would have been too far beyond her comfort zone anyway. Having to run a shell script to plug into OBS on top of using OBS itself. (Going to avoid further ranting and stop now)
Edit: to be clear, I didn't get the app installed in WinBoat as I didn't get passed the limitation that Edge wouldn't load properly. Just with that hiccup I determined it was unfit for her usage... that isn't even getting into the potential issue(s) with mic/camera access.
An actual explanation of what the software does, from their Github repo
> WinBoat is an Electron app which allows you to run Windows apps on Linux using a containerized approach. Windows runs as a VM inside a Docker container, we communicate with it using the WinBoat Guest Server to retrieve data we need from Windows. For compositing applications as native OS-level windows, we use FreeRDP together with Windows's RemoteApp protocol.
Why do they need a docker container and a vm?
because windows isn't bloat enough /runs-away-as-this-joke-might-not-be-funny-toall-xD
VM runs the actual thing, and docker is package manager.
But my read is that the electron application is out of the docker container. It's distributed as an appimage.
So then what is the docker container doing?
The docker container hosts QEMU and the docker files to run Windows. The author probably chose this method because the dockur/windows project basically automates and simplifies the whole process of installing and configuring QEMU, and installing and configuring Windows etc.
See: https://github.com/dockur/windows
Maybe I would call Docker an installation and running method rather than a package manager in this case.
Absolutely love seeing these projects that put a friendly face on amazing open source software so people can more easily run Linux and use the software they still need to..
Any similar work underway to get macOS apps running on Linux?
I wish it was possible to see macOS running well on Linux, but there are a lot of loopholes to jump through to make that happen.
1. Apple makes running their software on non-Mac hardware illegal
2. For all the hate Windows gets, virtualizing it to run all over the place is normal and expected by industry at large… the same is only becoming recently true for macOS
3. There is a strong financial interest at Apple to get in the way of this as much as possible
4. Apple is trying to reinvent Docker so people stop using Docker on their Mac’s with their native “Apple Containers” implementation
Due to this… I foresee it taking a while for this to become common for mac apps + Linux
macOS does in fact runs well* on Linux, see: https://github.com/dockur/macos
Edit: Well-ish, as there's no GPU acceleration as noted in the comments below.
For some values of "well". No GPU acceleration means it's incredibly sluggish and plagued with rendering issues. There's also some sort of incompatibility around clock sources, which can result in the VM crashing during startup if you assign more than one core to it. There are ways around it but if you're unlucky enough they result in a massive perf hit.
This is cool, I'd be a bit hesitant to sign into my Apple Account with it though. I've had Apple shut down my account with Hackintosh's in the past.
quickemu makes it pretty easy to launch macOS on kvm. I was able to launch it on my framework chromebook from the Linux terminal
a bit off-topic, but how do you like the framework chromebook? Very seriously considering one. I have several frameworks running Fedora, but my daughter really wants a chromebook...
I really like it actually. It's a powerhouse with 64G RAM and NVME.
Crostini and Android apps make it really versatile. I run the dev channel and there are all kinds of interesting features and experiments to play with. Arch instead of Debian for crostini.
Was really disappointed when framework discontinued it, but it seems like chromeos is converging into Android.
The flip side is that we now have crostini for Android. Chromeos android subsystem has not been updated to be able run it if you are wondering, heh.
Not quite similar, but there's darling, which only supports CLI apps for now: https://github.com/darlinghq/darling
If you want a full macOS VM there's dockur's project: https://github.com/dockur/macos but no seamless mode support yet.
macOS doesn't support doing rootless RDP with macOS apps. If you're going to be using a full desktop anyway, skip RDP entirely and use an accelerated graphics view.
> [Flatpak, Podman?]: This is on our to-do list, but it'll take some effort because Flatpak is pretty isolated from the rest of the system and apps, so we'd have to find a way to expose installed apps, the Docker binary, and the Docker socket, and many other utilities
Vinegar wraps WINE in a Flatpak.
The vscode flatpak works with podman-remote packaged at a flatpak too; or you can call `host-spawn` or `flatpak-spawn` like there's no container/flatpak boundary there.
Nested rootless containers do work somehow; presumably with nested /etc/subuids for each container?
Distrobox passes a number of flags necessary to run GUI apps in rootless containers with Podman. Unfortunately the $XAUTHORITY path varies with each login on modern systemd distros.
Ive been on DOS and Windows since the 80's... Recently I was mainly using Windows 10 LTSC, but now I'm finally transitioning to Linux Mint as my daily driver.. It's just so *good* .. The functionality, ease of use, and "just works" aspects of it are better than any other OS imo. It shows what can happen when a small team works with the goal of just making the OS good and giving it as much functionality as possible vs when a giant corp works on it with all sorts of random goals and agendas.
I am a game dev and avid gamer, so that was the only thing keeping me on Windows, but with stuff like Wine, Bottles, Proton, Lutris, + stuff like this coming out that reason is fading away.
I’m also an 80s DOS user. Commodore actually before that. And yes Linux Mint is the standout. There are people in the Linux community though that resist it for various reasons. It’s like trying to round up cats.
I read all of the comments here and I see an awful lot of people that stand on their heads to avoid using Windows, yet it seems they want what Windows offers.
I’ve used many distro’s over the decades. But for a user, Mint is the best. Unfortunately for someone who is anti-Windows, it’s also the closest thing to a Windows clone!
I refuse to dual boot and run all of the emulation software. But what killed it for me was the most popular competitive games. The most advanced anti-cheat software that keeps gaming fun from cheaters is only on Windows. So that’s what I use exclusively. Those more effective anti-cheat mechanisms are never going to be on Linux. Windows is increasingly going to be where it’s at for desktop gaming unless a guy wants to move over to consoles. There’s just no real answer for this.
If anyone from the project reads this:please don't load Discord on the front page of your website.
Discord is often used as C2 server, and in many secure environments will trigger alerts when someone tries to load it. So loading your webpage triggers an alert (luckily the alert in our business come to me, but the point stands).
At least hide it behind a link.
The rule of thumb is if you can use Linux and you don't have a very weird niche application that only runs on Windows, then you should migrate to Linux. There are plenty of good entry-level distributions and all sorts of applications too. Sooner or later, Windows will be abandonware with all the BS they will integrate, from always online to AI scanning all your files, so be proactive. I think even macOS is better than Windows in the current day, and you don't need a fortune too. The other day I found a mid-2012 MacBook Pro for $15 at the thrift store, installed 16GiB RAM and an SSD that I both had around, and installed the latest Sequoia with OpenCore Legacy Patcher, and voila, works just like new!
Until that day, there unfortunately ARE niche applications. Fieldworks Language Explorer (aka FLEx) is software developed by SIL Inc for doing linguistic fieldwork (dictionaries, text, grammars, parsing...) in minority languages. There's nothing like it. There was a Linux version, but they ran out of funding; I've used it, but reportedly there are major bugs.
FLEx won't run under Wine, but I'll be trying this WinBoat to see if it works.
(You may have heard of SIL's fonts, which they also make freely available. The fonts work for a huge variety of scripts, including the Nasta'liq Arabic style that other fonts don't touch, and Burmese, which from a writing standpoint is truly crazy.)
> Sooner or later, Windows will be abandonware with all the BS they will integrate, from always online to AI scanning all your files
I really hope this is correct. If there were any justice in the world....
But, oh my aching head, the IT industry seems to be fill of people barely holding on, hoping and preying nobody calls their bluff.
To these people, who hold a death grip on middle management, "nobody gets fired for buying microsoft" is a real thing
Quality be dammed, job security rules the roost
Active Directory alone means that its going to be another COBOL where it takes a few generations to die off, as its originators die.
The problem is that some of these niche Windows-only applications rely on drivers that are only available for Windows. In which case, migrating to Linux is challenging at best and impossible at worst.
Their FAQ mentions the Looking Glass Indirect Display Driver (IDD). That is something to look forward to. Looking Glass will work with an iGPU setup once IDD is released (but no 3D acceleration).
What Looking Glass managed to do was get video memory sharing to work between the guest Windows compositor and a client running on the host (with qemu). Unfortunately, it apparently requires an out-of-tree Linux kernel driver that they call kvmfr. You can apparently still share non-video memory without kvmfr, which may hopefully yield adequate performance.
Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg50X9w5llI
I always used a Virtual Box VM for Office. After giving this a quick try, I'm impressed. The dockered VM is much less bloated then a normal Windows install, and somehow running the apps via a local RDP connection is significantly smoother than the Virtual Box graphics stack.
I have had much better experience running virt-manager instead of virtualbox if you want a GUI to run / manage vms in terms of performance. YMMV
WinBoat seems interesting. I will be keeping my eye on this one.
Since I started using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) in the last couple of years.. especially at work.. my work has been more productive, running certain GUI apps that "appear" to be running on Windows. There are some odd quirks to it, but its decent. On top of this, I can run podman or use shell tools (and bash)
However, I was wondering what the opposite equiverlant would be in linux land. I mean, I rarely use Windows Applications when on a Linux machine. In the past, I remember playing GTA:Vice City through Wine and was 98% awesome. Just a few missing images and thats it. Other than this, I've had little reason to use Windows applications on Linux.
Recently, I always wondered if there would be a "Linux Subsystem for Windows" equiverlant, abling to run pretty much any app. It would give my daughter the upperhand, which I recently installed Debian on her laptop... but I know there will be some Schoolwork with Microsoft products... WinBoat might be the answer.
> Run Any App > If it runs on Windows, it can run on WinBoat.
Did I miss an asterisk here? One that adds "except apps that require a GPU, that access non-USB devices, those with anti-cheat..."
By default, yes, but they can all be supported, with some manual work, depending on your exact scenario. Check r/vfio if you're interested.
Anti-cheat can be a hit-or-miss depending on the game, but for many games you can edit the VM XML to simulate real hardware. But of course you may not want to do that if you don't want to risk getting banned. Personally I don't play such user-hostile games that employ malware-like anticheat (and neither should you, if you care about privacy and security), but that's a whole other debate.
If I understand it correctly, unlike WINE this requries an actual Windows licence (at least if you wish to stay legal)?
Yes, the dockered Windows 11 will start nagging you for a license keys after a while. I used some old Win10 key, and it worked fine.
WinApps is the project to watch (https://github.com/Fmstrat/winapps), although they're still working on Wayland support (https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps/issues/779#issuecomme...). It can get by through xwayland for the time being, it seems.
They don't need to "work" on Wayland support at all, all that work is being done by the FreeRDP project.
Also, sdl3-freerdp is the new Wayland client for FreeRDP is already available, and it works fine. You can just edit the shortcuts/bash scripts and replace xfreerdp with sdl3-freerdp and bam, you've got Wayland support.
Mounting live Discord on your front page. Bold choice.
Does it have display manager integration akin to Parallels Desktop’s Coherence mode? This is what the catch-phrase of WinBoat makes it sound like.
https://kb.parallels.com/4670
————
Edit: yes it does! See the README.md of the project on GitHub:
> Elegant Interface: Sleek and intuitive interface that seamlessly integrates Windows into your Linux desktop environment, making it feel like a native experience
Source: https://github.com/TibixDev/winboat
my windows paranoia got so high, i misread that as WinBloat
trying it out just now, seems like a great idea !
Heads up for arm64 users: there’s currently no precompiled arm64 support.
Why doesn't the FAQ actually explain what it is? Is it a VM running windows? WINE? That free NT kernel? Something else?
It is a VM running Windows, specifically it's a QEMU VM in a Docker container and KVM backend.
See: https://github.com/dockur/windows
Is there a way to use this with a remote windows VM that I connect with over RDP?
You can use WinApps for that instead - supports both local and remote VMs. https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps
It would be worthwhile to mention Proton IMO. Actually, without GPU pass through (yet, at least) I guess they are not even going after the same use-case anyway. It is just the other obvious comparison after Wine.
A few folks have managed to get GPU passthrough working https://github.com/dockur/windows/issues/22
Which always worked with KVM + Qemu w/ VFIO a decade ago? I'm not sure how anything in this page or comments is new, or even more convenient.
Is it WinApps[0] with some fancy GUI or something?
[0] https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps
Basically yes, although WinApps uses a VM directly (and requires you to set it up first), whereas this project uses the dockur/windows container which automates the whole setup, making it easier for newbies.
Technical users are probably better off spinning up their own VM though.
Looks like a Windows VM with extras. I'd prefer Wine approach.
Sure, Wine when it works. It doesn't always, and it looks like this WinBoat will work when Wine doesn't. I'm currently using it for SIL's Fieldworks Language Explorer, which did not run under Wine.
Is this Parallels Desktop but for Linux? If so, this could be interesting however, what about graphics intensive applications? What does this offer that Proton or Wine doesn’t solve?
Sort of, but nowhere as polished.
For graphics intensive apps, you can get GPU passthrough working with some effort[1] but it's not really end-user friendly.
Also, I wouldn't say it's an alternative to Proton, in fact it's probably worse than Proton because of the limited refresh rate, colors, and added latency of the RDP protocol that it uses to display the desktop.
But it can be an alternative to Wine, since you're able to run certain apps that can't run in Wine, like Office 365, Adobe etc. This is where it shines, for people who are dependent on productivity apps like Office.
[1] https://github.com/dockur/windows/issues/22
Ewww, RDP… thanks, that explains all I need to know. It’s a virtualbox.
Am I reading this right? It can run Excel more or less seamlessly like it's a native Linux program? Is there a catch?
That would be game changing in convincing some people to switch to Linux.
Well yes, it runs Excel in a VM running Windows. Which means you need an extra Windows license to be able to do it legally, but other than that, it works...
Not only a license, but I’m kind of still seeing that you would need to run your Windows VM with the entire range of Microsoft updates, defender, antivirus, and monitoring if your corporate, etc.
No?
Furthest at the absolute bottom: "Yes :)"
Freerdp (which this project and every other similar one depends on) is 100% broken on wayland for this use case. I'm not going back to X11.
Are apps run through WinBoat limited to 60hz like regular Windows VMs? I’ve gotten to used to higher refresh rates and 1 window being a lower rate drives me nuts!
Yes, you can't get more than 60FPS, it's a limitation of the RDP protocol.
I'm just here to let the internet know, if you struggle to setup Citrix on (Arch) Linux, this seems to work out of the box
Looks useful for things that don't work in Wine.
This looks nice, WinBoat gives teams a simple way to use linux for everyone, without losing access to Windows apps when needed. There’s no need for fancy cloud setups or switching between lots of devices—just one system and quick access to what works.
Onboarding is easier for everyone, and IT does less work with only one setup to care for. This means companies can pick what’s best without making things messy or complicated.
For what you're describing, there are already Enterprise-grade solutions that's even simpler and more robust, such as Azure Virtual Desktop with RemoteApps, and the even more mature and battle-tested Citrix XenApps / Cloud.
Like for my work, I use a Linux laptop, and access our Windows-only apps and environments via Citrix and it works really well. And a good chunk of our apps are cloud-based anyways so we just need a web browser to access them.
I also own a MacBook and have an Android phone, and I can access my work environment from all my devices. So at least for our workplace, the end-user OS has been largely irrelevant.
This reads like AI and almost none of it makes sense. Why would a Windows desktop fleet be more heterogeneous than a Linux one? Why would Linux be an easier on-boarding experience?
Orgs use Windows because non-technical users expect it and execs don't get fired for choosing Microsoft.
Onboarding non-technical people to a computer that’s running half the apps in a different is virtualized and all the things that can go wrong with that sounds a nightmare.
How you gonna justify buying a windows license for each user and then not just using that and forcing them to use some interface they’re unfamiliar with.
I get the vision but ultimately if they need to run windows apps for work, just have them run windows.
There’s places where people should consider Linux but that isn’t one of them.
Incredibly shady of you to rewrite your whole comment (or have your bot change the tone) because it was obviously AI-written before
The remote Windows equivalent is kimmknight/remoteapptool which generates an RDP config or MSI, basically open source Vmware Horizon.
We need something better than RDP for running windows VMs locally. Can't a buffer be memory-mapped or something?
This is exactly what the Looking Glass project is working on, their next release is expected to include their Indirect Display Driver that pretty much solves all the graphics limitations of RDP, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg50X9w5llI
Purple gradients and emojis somehow scream vibe coded trash
previously featured: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45099124
They are really going to need to change that branding to avoid trouble.
Does it have Windows APIs for sub systems like certificates/auth stores?
It's just a VM running full Windows. It doesn't provide any win32 APIs or ways to interact with them, besides creating shortcuts to apps inside Windows using RDP/FreeRDP's RemoteApp functionality.
> So, am I able to run Office 365 on it?
> Yes. :)
I mean, great. I've never actually tried since going all in on Linux. Figured I'd just abandon the Windows world. This would be useful though.
Does anyone here actually do this, with Winboat or any other tool? Every time I've tried it's been too flaky to be worthwhile, but it's been a good few years.
I'd chuffing love to have Affinity back.
It's just a VM + an RDP connection in rootless mode. You can do it, but RDP is flaky in rootless mode.
I'm currently using a similar setup for Office. You lose drag and drop, and you will be restarting the RDP client over and over again.
It's a "solution" if you're willing to put up with jank.
Thanks, I see stuff like this and think, "well if it worked well everyone would use it all the time".
Affinity is something I use occasionally enough to be able to put up with a bit of jank.
Appreciate the response, good to know what I'm getting into before diving into something.
Affinity actually works fine in Wine (last I checked), takes a bit of effort to set it up though: https://github.com/seapear/AffinityOnLinux
Thank you kindly
Out of interest why do you need to?
I've always been fine with libre office/Google docs since moving to Linux, but I'm not a heavy office user.
I get documents from a variety of clients that use Office, and often get spreadsheets that have to work without any bugs or surprises. It also helps when I'm screensharing to use tools people are familiar with.
The final reason is that I hate having to redo my resume, which I made originally as a .docx that doesn't render well outside of Word. Even between Word versions it fucks up. I'm soft-locked in.
Not an awful lot these days, but I used to write long, bureaucratic docs for a living, worked a lot with complex budgets and financial reports too.
Nothing beats native Word or Excel for this sort of work. Browser-based tools and open alternatives don't come close.
Fortunately, it's not my main line of work now and I can get away without. I'd still love to be able to use Word and Excel natively though.
Is this a wrapper on Wine? Or a full VM?
It's a full VM running via Docker. The Windows apps are presented via RDP's RemoteApps protocol via FreeRDP.
There's also WinApps, which is the same thing but without the docker container, and it supports a remote VM as well: https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps
What's Docker for, then?
VM management. The dockur/windows VMs will correctly shutdown, start, pause, etc when the container is started or destroyed.
WinBoat uses Docker (specifically the dockur/windows container) to simplify the backend setup. The Docker container hosts QEMU and all the configs to automate the whole "create a VM, configure it, install Windows, configure it etc" process.
will it allow me to run WSL on linux too? (genuinely curious)
Some of y’all are acting like this dude personally insulted you.
They put out an open source project for folks to use that may solve a problem for someone out there. That’s neat. If it has faults maybe we can be a bit more constructive and less all “wtf is this crap?”
> AppImage
No, thanks.
color accurate work? HDR? variable refresh? also it's still windows garbage underneath