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Comment by darklajid | Hacker News Reader

I'm thinking of going down that route, but for various reasons I NEED Outlook and Office a lot, although my main work is development and could work on another platform.

If you do this (as I did in the past) you're now juggling N Windows VMs to avoid ONE Windows host system..

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Why N VMs? You had one before, you can have one VM with multiple apps (if you can even count office parts as multiple apps)

Sorry, kinda mixed the "Need office" requirement I wrote about and my previous "Different VMs for different needs" (Office was one, a Windows product I build extensions for was in another, then the corporate environment tends to keep VMware images around to simulate a customer environment / to prepare a demo system for sales etc etc).

You're right. One VM could work for office and other utilities. Unfortunately for me it grew into a mess of VMs, fast.

I think Qubes OS targets your use case. It has support for Windows 7 although I never got around to trying it out.

If you can set up stuff in Windows VM, you can enable RemoteApp and freerdp can just show a seamless window. Kind of like parallels.

How about the Office / Outlook Web interfaces, shouldn't they be usable from any OS?

They don’t handle well some edge cases, for example I had Word documents with complex layouts that would be broken and partially unreadable when using the web version of Word.

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