alt Hacker NewsWinApps: Run Windows apps as if they were a part of the native Linux OS
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I see it's time for the bimonthly reinvention of VirtualBox and VMWare's seamless modes from a few faceless techies on GitHub and designed for people who can't be bothered to use WINE or VirtualBox.
Thought "isn't that just Wine" but no! They are virtualizing it! And integrating them seamlessly with Linux desktop somehow!
Looks pretty cool. I remember playing with something similar in Virtualbox, it had a seamless mode too. It was a bit janky, and I think they removed it recently.
I used it in the old days, to have MSN messenger on Ubuntu :)
How good is it in practice? I've found windows VMs under a Linux host to be frustrating to use, and get poor performances no matter how much resources I throw at it. The clock keeps getting messed up all the time. UI is sluggish.
I now use a dedicated windows laptop in RDP and it is such a better experience better than a VM.
> Icon in the Public Domain.
You can't re-create an icon to circumvent trademark law.
Using icon to refer to an application is fair use.
I am not sure what's the point of having a public domain icon.
This is cool, When i looked at this i thought it was just WinBoat, Turn's out, it's not But of course there isn't a way to run it at the same performance as if windows was installed as the main OS. You would always need some kind of virtualization. Anyways, This is a very cool project. Good luck!
It really whips the llamas ass ....
This popped into my head before I had a second to do a double take.
I tried this method for my wife. So she could use ms office in Linux. This isn’t an elegant solution. She’s back to windows 11. We tried…
I would be looking for a solution to run Minecraft official launcher in Linux. It is heavily integrated with Windows extras such as the Microsoft Store.
This is the last holdout to get my children on Linux.
Parallels coherence mode in MacOS is similar.
Windows have wsl and linux have wine,winapps etc
at some point in the future, Your OS wouldnt matters because all OS is reaching feature parity
I've had mixed results with this, recent versions of Adobe in particular gave me trouble.
I've been meaning to try WinBoat, but it's based on the same underlying technology (docker+RDP) so I'm guessing I'll hit the same bugs. I was thinking maybe i could alter the code to launch a different RDP client instead of the default.
Still, if you just need Office, it's a much more integrated setup than you can easily achieve with VMs.
This system works by launching an official Windows image in Docker and then making an RDP connection to it. There are a couple of others too now like WinBoat
What all of them avoid mentioning is that the images were intended by Microsoft for test and development purposes on Windows and the license clearly states you need a valid Windows license to use them: https://hub.docker.com/r/microsoft/windows#license
I wonder if Microsoft will take some action to enforce this if these projects become popular.
Edit: This comment is incorrect, see below comment from doctorpangloss