In my persistence to fit Linux in my life, I’m curious if some “must have” Windows software will work better if I just ran a Windows VM within Linux.
None of the software I need to work is needed to work continuously. They are basically programs that I fire up when needed, for a few minutes, then exited.
Wine will install them, but not run them, so I’m hoping a VM is the answer as I’m not interested in dual-booting to run a few Windows programs occasionally.
Yeah, sometimes there just isn’t another option. I have a 60GiB Win11 VM for things I use every few months for a couple of minutes at a time
I’d recommend https://www.qemu.org/ for virtualisation
https://virt-manager.org/ for a gui to manage VMs, you can easily add or remove cores, memory, internet, directories etc really easily.
https://github.com/winfsp/winfsp lets you add a directory from your host to the VM to easily share files
https://github.com/virtio-win/virtio-win-guest-tools-installer makes the cursor seamlessly move between the VM and host instead of pressing ctrl alt g to escape.
Win11 23H2 still allows for offline set up. Just press shift f10 when you’re at the internet set up and type
oobe/bypassnro
The VM will reboot and give you the option to select I don’t have internet so you can just use a local account
https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat/ for getting rid of the unwanted bloatware
Theres also an easy way to activate windows for free, I don’t think I can link it here but its on github and MAS-sive amount of people have starred it.
The software will likely work, but keep in mind that you’ll have to add VM startup time when you want to use the software. I have occasionally seen software behave strangely in a VM as well, so best to just try it.
Can you share the software you went to use? Maybe there’s a good Linux alternative or someone knows how to get it working in wine.
VM startup time can be skipped by saving state instead of shutting it down every time.
I would say the worst issue using a VM is with programs that need the GPU (e.g. CAD softwares or games), and software with aggressive DRM.
Sounds like they’re using it on their desktop, so passthru is probably going to be a mess regardless of hypervisor type, since they probably can’t do exclusive access to it.
Can you share the software you went to use? Maybe there’s a good Linux alternative or someone knows how to get it working in wine.
These are all paid programs that don’t have viable alternatives and/or I actually need to use them.
A few off the top of my head:
- Excire Foto
- Jpegmini Pro
- Garmin Basecamp
- Garmin Express
- several paid video editing/photo editing apps; I’ve tried alternatives, but they aren’t nearly as intuitive.
- Reolink camera software.
- ACP Ups software.
I do my best to find alternatives to other software, and prefer to use self-hosted solutions, but the ones above aren’t really easy to replace, so I’d rather just run them in a VM.
I’ve use VMs in windows to run Linux, so I’m aware of the performance hit and possible startup times (but I use snapshots for quick access). I’m not too concerned about that for any of these programs, since I’m only using them from time-to-time.
Have you checked these all on winehq? It would be nice for them to be reported with logs if they haven’t already.
Garmin Express for example is on there with some discussion here: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=40213
It might not help in the short term, but even just having logs for more broken programs could be useful for the wine project.
If it runs under WINE, it will probably be higher performance and of course integrates better into the rest of your system ( eg. files ).
If it does not work under WINE, it will probably work in a VM. So, depending on the app, this may be the only choice.
Apps that depend on talking to specific hardware ( including the GPU ) do not always work in a VM.
So, it depends…
VMs can be slow AF tho. Also, they use up a lot of disk space and RAM, because you have a whole ectra OS in there. But yeah, a lot of proprietary things work better in VMs with their native OS.
I’ve used plenty of Linux VMs through Windows, so I’m aware of the limitations. I’m not trying to game through a VM, more like accessing some programs that I need for a few minutes at a time (and not even on a daily basis).
I have set up OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on a couple of my machines with Windows 11 in a KVM virtual machine. Windows runs at a perfectly good speed in this setup, and I use it when I want quick access to proprietary software that only runs in Windows. It’s simpler and more reliable than messing around with Wine. It can be a little more complicated if you want to share folders between guest and host, but there are several ways you can achieve that.
Yes. And depending on the the VM and the app, you can get a ‘seamless mode’ that looks like a native Linux app.
VMs work most of the time quite well if you have enough RAM. (The VM always works, some applications will detect unusual hardware and may complain, e.g. unsupported GPU. Any sane software should run, though (e.g. with gpu acceleration).)
