WinBoat: Windows apps on Linux with seamless integration
winboat.app
winboat.app
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?).
If you don't want the latter part, you'd be better served with the dockur/windows image + FreeRDP
This project looks like it does that, but I could be wrong.
That's what "rootless" mode does.
It's reminiscent of rootless mode in Parallels, just as janky, too.
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.
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).
/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).
And also, it doesn't really follow that nomenclature. Those all follow "user code target" Subsystem. Windows Subsystem, OS/2 Subsystem, Posix Subsystem, etc.
if you are capable of running linux, you're capable of working out the various ways to bypass that sign-in "requirement".
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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 :)
Sorry boss I can't do work today, I decided to go full Linux and our CRM doesn't support it!
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.
(For games, there is Proton.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
Well that’s just Adobe badumtsssss
Agree that modern apps are hit and miss.
Done
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.
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 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.
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?
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).
Disclosure: I'm 100% Linux since 2005 (except embed devices (game console, Roku)). All the Line-of-Business stuff "just works".
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Valves native Linux ports changed the situation at home. But when these get native ports Microsoft loses ground in the industry.
Not in the companies which buy everything a “Microsoft Sales Droid” offers. But many (young and old) Admins would cheer, and escape path out of hell. The short sighted MBAs are the biggest internal enemy?
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.
> All modules that call a Unix library contain WoW64 thunks to enable calling the 64-bit Unix library from 32-bit PE code. This means that it is possible to run 32-bit Windows applications on a purely 64-bit Unix installation. This is called the new WoW64 mode, as opposed to the old WoW64 mode where 32-bit applications run inside a 32-bit Unix process.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Any similar work underway to get macOS apps running on Linux?
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
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.
Edit: Well-ish, as there's no GPU acceleration as noted in the comments below.
If you want a full macOS VM there's dockur's project: https://github.com/dockur/macos but no seamless mode support yet.
> 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.
So then what is the docker container doing?
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.
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 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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Did I miss an asterisk here? One that adds "except apps that require a GPU, that access non-USB devices, those with anti-cheat..."
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.
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.
trying it out just now, seems like a great idea !
————
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
Technical users are probably better off spinning up their own VM though.
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.
That would be game changing in convincing some people to switch to Linux.
No?
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.
Orgs use Windows because non-technical users expect it and execs don't get fired for choosing Microsoft.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I've always been fine with libre office/Google docs since moving to Linux, but I'm not a heavy office user.
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.
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.
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
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?”
> folks
There goes the neighbourhood.
No, thanks.