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 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).
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.
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.
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.
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".
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 you say "I use Mac for X and Y". Having a whole extra, not cheap 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.
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 (it happens that I run a childhood game every 5 years or so using Wine, without which I would just not bother at all - and this might be one of the best illustration of my stable API point actually).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
> [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.
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.
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.
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?).
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…
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).
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 project looks like it does that, but I could be wrong.
It's reminiscent of rootless mode in Parallels, just as janky, too.
That's what "rootless" mode does.
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
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 :)
Disclosure: I'm 100% Linux since 2005 (except embed devices (game console, Roku)). All the Line-of-Business stuff "just works".
"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 you say "I use Mac for X and Y". Having a whole extra, not cheap 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.
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 (it happens that I run a childhood game every 5 years or so using Wine, without which I would just not bother at all - and this might be one of the best illustration of my stable API point actually).
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
Done
Sorry boss I can't do work today, I decided to go full Linux and our CRM doesn't support it!
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?
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
Edit: Well-ish, as there's no GPU acceleration as noted in the comments below.
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.
If you want a full macOS VM there's dockur's project: https://github.com/dockur/macos but no seamless mode support yet.
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.
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
trying it out just now, seems like a great idea !
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.
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.
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.)
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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