5d ago

GitHub - winapps-org/winapps: Run Windows apps such as Microsoft Office/Adobe in Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora) and GNOME/KDE as if they were a part of the native OS, including Nautilus integration.

GitHub - winapps-org/winapps: Run Windows apps such as Microsoft Office/Adobe in Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora) and GNOME/KDE as if they were a part of the native OS, including Nautilus integration. Hard fork of https://github.com/Fmstrat/winapps/

Linux @programming.dev

cm0002 @programming.dev

5d ago

GitHub - winapps-org/winapps: Run Windows apps such as Microsoft Office/Adobe in Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora) and GNOME/KDE as if they were a part of the native OS, including Nautilus integration.

github.com /winapps-org/winapps

Linux Furs @pawb.social

Southern Wolf @pawb.social

5d ago

GitHub - winapps-org/winapps: Run Windows apps such as Microsoft Office/Adobe in Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora) and GNOME/KDE as if they were a part of the native OS, including Nautilus integration.

github.com /winapps-org/winapps

94 comments

And so cometh the foretold LSW (Linux Subsystem for Windows)
- And with it, the infinitely recursive wsllswwsllswwsllsw...
  
  It’s subsystems all the way down
Additional Features
The GNU/Linux /home directory is accessible within Windows via the \\tsclient\home mount
Well I for one won't be touching this with a ten foot pole.
- That's just a feature of XFreeRDP. You literally just have to delete one flag from the command that starts the RDP client if you don't want to share you home dir. I'm not sure if winapps-org is still just a shell script but the original winapps was, so modifying the command was trivial.
  
  But having it on by default is a dangerous anti-feature.
So... What make it's different from PlayOnLinux or Bottles or Winetricks ?
- They can't run Adobe. This runs a full VM constantly in the background that you can pop up when you want to use the Windows desktop to install things etc. It's a completely different set up. It can also run ArcGIS Pro, which the other methods can't.
  
  So this can run latest MS OFFICE and Adobe Suite you say ??
  
  How different is it, then, functionality-wise, from VirtualBox or VMWare?
  
  me running adobe ps cc 2023 in wine for the last 2 years: * stares in doubt
  
  ESRI sucks horribly, getting away from that trash is a good idea.
  There is no good use case for that crap.
- Unlike the Wine based stuff (Bottles, Winetricks), this runs actual Windows as a VM. So compatibility will be far better though performance will be worse.
  
  And it comes with all the downsides that Windows does.
Well will it run Winamp because I inadvertently read the title as Winamp and now I need it again
- Audacious is your friend. It accepts old Winamp skins!
  I've been rocking the Windows XP skin on Linux Mint
- It really whips the llama's ass!
  
  *ehc ehc ehc ehceeh
- AFAIK I am pretty sure Winamp works fine on Wine.
- Yes, but there is a Winamp Wine based package somewhere iirc.
I don't ever mean to be a downer but I feel this will hurt users in the long run. Just simy extending an umbilicle to Microsoft's teat because they can't be assed to let go and stop suckling. M$O and Adobe CC are some of the worst offenders for SaaS bullshittery.
- The thing is, sometimes you need Microsoft not of your own volition but because of bureaucracy. When I was signing a contract recently, the government required me to fill in a office word document and it would not work at all on libre, I had to scramble around the house, went through 3 different computers trying to get any of them to have office working after I just recently uninstalled it from all of them to use libre only, but in the end I had to use a university computer to fill in the doc.
- As much as I want to move from them, Excel and Photoshop are too advance compared to any alternative, including both FOSS and commercial one.
  Even Excel Online is not as advance as Excel desktop.
  Casual users can get away from them, not advance user that needs unique feature only available in the software.
  
  You are gonna love only office. Their spreadsheet work as close to excil as possible.
What's the difference of this and WINE?
- tldr: VM->RDP seamless render
  WinApps works by: Running Windows in a Docker, Podman or libvirt virtual machine. Querying Windows for all installed applications. Creating shortcuts to selected Windows applications on the host GNU/Linux OS. Using FreeRDP as a backend to seamlessly render Windows applications alongside GNU/Linux applications.
- Wine Is Not an Emulator.
  This is an Emulator.
Anyone try this yet? Office and adobe on Linux easily working on Linux would be big.
- It running in podman just windows VM and connection to real host done with rdp window capture from windows.I tried it not that bad can be used for office work i used it with tiny11
- Yea it's great!
I used to use this, but I always found it really janky - window boundaries not updating, weird graphical glitches, etcetera.
It was especially annoying to use with Photoshop and GPU acceleration (I do GPU passthrough to my VM).
In the end, I just abandoned it and just used the monitor the VM’s GPU is plugged into.
What’s actually the best one? I used to use PlayOnLinux and it worked so well. But then it started to have problems and I read it was abandoned.
So, for example, if I wanted to play Guild Wars with multilaunch, what integrator would be smoothest and least complicated?
- Speaking from my egregious amount of hours in GW1&2 back in the day, you should just launch it through steam with Proton. Check people's settings here: https://www.protondb.com/app/1284210 There is likely a Lutris prefab as well.
  
  Yeah I don’t play it on Steam, I use the old launcher because I run multilaunch. I was playing it back in ‘06 and am stuck in my ways.
  I’ll take a look in Lutris, though, thanks.
What about graphics acceleration? Does it need gpu pass through?
- Running Windows in a Docker, Podman or libvirt virtual machine
  Seems to me like GPU acceleration should be supported. Libvirt probably requires dedicated passthrough or sophisticated methods like SR-IOV.
- I know there are ways you can tailor your VM to use the hardware, but am no expert.
- I'm positive it has the same issues as any other Windows VM setup. If you've got two GPUs, you can probably pass one of them through to the VM and get good graphical performance.
  I wish the virtio-gpu stuff hadn't died on Windows...
  EDIT: It might not be dead? That's cool if so.
I feel mislead, none of the apps actually run on Linux.
Wait, Docker and Podman can create Windows VMs?
I had winapps setup using QEMU quite a while ago but this seems like a much tidier setup.
- Docker and Podman can't run Windows VMs by themselves. These containers use QEMU, so it's essentially a pre-made setup for what you already had.
  
  That's a shame. Still very cool and much tidier than doing it directly but I thought you could actually pull windows:latest now and get going.
- I am running it on Docker. :)
- https://github.com/dockur/windows
- Yeah, had to dive in myself.
  The answer is no, they can’t. You need to pass /dev/kvm and /dev/net/tun in a composefile for a reason.
  There’s no „windows in docker”, but rather „handy windows vm orchestrator with nice UI in a container”. A bit of a mouthful.
Does anyone know if it can run Visual Studio? Would be awesome so i could switch to Linux for my Job
- it's listed on the project's readme!
  
  Ah thabks, missed it the first time reading through it
- Visual Studio Code runs natively on linux. Not sure if that's what you meant though.
  
  i think they're talking about the proper old visual studio, a full-blown IDE!
- Probably!
Will this work with music producing software like Ableton or will it introduce too much latency?
- It should be ok, I think. I am running ArcGIS which is pretty resource heavy and it works just fine.
- You'd just have normal Windows latency + pipewire latency.
  Pipewire can adjust for latency on the source, so if you're running a monitor of an instrument directly on Linux it won't be out of sync.
  You may need to edit a config file or two once you know exactly how much latency comes from Windows/the vm software.
sure you can but why would you want to
- I'm gonna try this out. I like to use a DnD character generation sheet that only supports Adobe PDF with its js shenanigans. There really isn't any sheet generator that comes close to it, I checked.
  
  A DND character sheet is enough to use adobe? I wonder how we ever got by before it.
  In any case let's see it. Curious if I could change it to something else, or is it custom by you?
This is (like) virtualbox running in seamless mode...
Paint.net' child window always got mess up and float across the screen towards the left side
Yah, I dinked with this for far too long on several docker-based windows installs I have around the network including localhost on a non-standard port. Fails to set up and gives no messages to follow up when it does. I can connect to them fine with a normal xfreerdp command.
2/7
- The config files need to be just right for this to work. It took a little fiddling at first but it works on Kubuntu 25.04 for the last few months.
- docker based windows install ? How ? windows in qemu in docker ?
  office in wine in docker and somehow exporting display to wayland ?
  How does that work ?
  
  I've been using the same windows/dockur setup for a couple years that they outline in the Winapp docs. It uses KVM via a docker cap you give it permission for in the docker compose.
  It should work with this Winapp thing, but I haven't gotten much success so far trying to connect it. I've just been RDPing into them but I'd have liked to just pull the relevant windows alone, more like Terminal Service Applications.
If that works with silly mobile games as well, maybe I can get my mom on Linux
- Waydroid for that.
If this can run Clip Studio Paint, I'll take it.
Krita and GIMP lacks too many advance features for comic creation.
- Worth a shot!
Nice I am going to give it a try. Thank you for sharing

94 comments