Winboat is pitched as an easy way to run a Windows VM. I haven't had time for experimenting since hearing about it, but since a fairly critical app I use stopped working via WINE a couple of months ago, I'm interested. It LOOKS like the Windows apps are in their own windows on the desktop, rather than running Windows in a little window, which would make it vastly preferable to other means I'm aware of.
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No, but I know the underlying tools that it uses under the hood has gotten some very good reviews:
So I would expect this to work nicely, but I'm not sure what the differences are.
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Docker is both renowned for its power and difficulty of use. The big difference, I expect, is that Winboat makes it not a colossal pain in the patoot.
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I'm currently running Winboat on Kubuntu. It's fairly straightforward once you've installed the very simple requirements. I'm testing, and it appears to work pretty well. I've installed Opera GX, Poker Stars, Microsoft Office 365, Remote Desktop (for the clouse VDI access from my work), and Visual Studio 2022 Enterprise.
When possible, install programs for all users so they install to C:\Program Files. Access to your Linux Home path is through an automatically mapped network share.
I was able to pass my work smartcard through to the Windows installation. Of course you have to make sure smartcard services are running on Linux.
I'm running with 8 TB of space and 64GB of RAM. I've played around with RAM and core assignments and have not had a hiccup at all as long as I stay at 1/2 RAM and the number of cores. With storage going to the "network" share, I kept the machine at 64 GB of drive space.
I was so pleased with my first experience that I donated $100 right away.
As soon as ZorinOS 18 is released, I'll try it out, but I have no doubt it will work fine.
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I never heard of it: Your post caused me to look up WinBoat.
It looks interesting - I am curious as to what more testing will show.
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Do you have to run Windows in dual boot or can you just download a Widows app from the web for Winboat to use any Win apt ??? ....
Reading their page, it is a competitor to Wine: You use it on GnuLinux to run Windows applications, without needing Windows OS installed.
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Thank you sir my just have to check it out just wanted to ask before I wasted my time as I can't always comprehend as much as I used to .... LOL
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It requires 32GB free space and it downloads the ISO-file for Windows 11, it does install substantial amounts of Windows files.
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Thanks for that additional information ..... guess I'll pass on it for now .... I finally got rid of Windows about a year ago quite by accident as I was dual booting with Zorin so I guess I'll keep it that way just in case M$ decides to do something sneaky .... LOL
Thank you - this sounds encouraging. My main work is legacy .NET in Visual Studio. At the moment this is on my older Win10 PC (staying on 10 although it is just new enough to 'upgrade' to 11) or dual boot with Win11 on this notebook.
Have you experienced any Visual Studio issues? I'm presuming it can download, install and run all the additional libraries it may need?
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I haven't used WinBoat, but I am using a very similar but non-GUI project that does essentially the same thing: WinApps
The both use dockur/windows under the hood to provision a Windows VM (you can pick which edition of Windows in the compose.yaml file) which you can access via RDP to install software which then shows up in your linux host's application launcher.
I only use it for Office 2021, primarily Excel, but it works well.
As far as I understand, Winapps requires 40GB free diskspace and plenty of command lines, whereas Winboat requires one or two command lines, all else appear to be equal.
Not really. The default disk size is 64GB, but it's defined in a YAML file that users can edit as they wish and the virtual disk itself is dynamic, so it only takes up as much space as is used by Windows and your installed apps.
Only if you want to customise stuff, really. Installing it is quite simple.
Okay.
Winboat seems really promising! Muta goes through how to get it working on arch
I just might give wingoat a try, to see if i can get Affinity Designer 2 working.
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In theory, if it doesn't rely too heavily on graphical acceleration and you have the memory, almost anything should work fine, because Winboat is taking a VM approach instead of compatibility layer like WINE. What WINE does is vastly more efficient in terms of resources, but it's not REALLY Windows. Winboat is.
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