You Can Now Run Any Windows App On Linux...
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mind explaining it in text instead of just linking a random video?

i myself can't use YT, i will not dive into the reason however, don't ask me that, you'd be talking to a wall
Going to guess the video link is about Proton which has been out for a while.
Originally posted by GigaCars:
mind explaining it in text instead of just linking a random video?

i myself can't use YT, i will not dive into the reason however, don't ask me that, you'd be talking to a wall
Hello guys and gals. Me Mudahar and you know when 50% of a video's comments are all about, "Hey Muda, can you show us how to run Windows applications in Linux?" Yeah, I made a video where I talked about the comet browser. You know, it's like the the previous video.
And a lot of people were like, "Wait a minute, you can just run Windows programs on your computer seamlessly.
Please show us this black magic." Why yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is in fact Photoshop running underneath the good old-fashioned Lunix system that I have. And no, it's actually not black magic, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, you too can actually use Photoshop underneath Linux. And I'm going to teach you how to do it. Okay, you can run any Windows program underneath Linux. So, let me get this started and tell you how things go. So, first off, ladies and gentlemen, there are a lot of tools that we Linux people use to play a lot of our video games underneath Linux. For instance, one of them is Wine, also Proton, which is basically a fork of something known as Wine, which is a set of tools that we use to convert Windows calls to Linux compliant calls. Meaning that when you run a game like Balders's Gate 3, uh the Windows version, it should basically run as if it was running on Windows, just on Linux, right? It's a lot of effort put into this kind of stuff. And for gaming, I think things are really awesome. Years ago when it came to Linux gaming, you know, it was like probably wait a year for basically most of these, you know, top like AAA games to work. But now it's actually more the exception rather than a norm. That's something that comes out day one. Just works across Linux. Uh, at least in my experience, provided those games don't have wonky anti-cheats or other weird flavors that uh, you know, just aren't really good for PC gaming anyways. But ladies and gentlemen, what about running Photoshop like I just showed you? What about running Microsoft Office? What about running FL Studio?
What about running all the programs that people cannot leave behind? So, look, Windows 10 is kind of currently at a point where you know, it's going to be end of life about next week. And uh you know, obviously for a lot of people who cannot upgrade or maybe are taking this time to switch over to Linux, a big question is can I run those applications I really enjoyed in Linux? So I'm going to teach you how it works. So basically one of the longabout ways is a tool called Win apps which basically installs a virtual machine on your computer that runs Windows and using something known as free RDP seamlessly runs those Windows programs and displays them on Linux as if they look like they were running natively but they're in a virtual machine. Now if you're wondering whoa Muda this is really complicated but there's a lot of cool programs like this. For instance, anything you see in this list runs pretty fine. And this includes a lot of programs that people need. But there's an easier version, ladies and gentlemen. Something known as Windboat. So Windbboat allows you to run Windows on Linux with seamless integration. So the features are it's an elegant interface, automated installs, running any application, file system integration, and much much more. So this is very much an infant program. It's not even at version 1.0. So there's a lot of stuff coming. So bear in mind this video is going to be outdated in the next few weeks, months, even years. Cuz if this develops the way that it has been, this could be a serious way for people to move off of, you know, uh, Windows or at least a dependency of needing Microsoft.
So look, how do you get this working? So first, you can download this as multiple packages. So for instance, if you're on a DBN distro like Linux Mint, Ubuntu or DBN, you can download a DEP file and install it using the software package manager. If you're on Fedora like Fedora Linux, uh CentOS or you know something like uh Basite for instance, you can download the RPM. If you're an Arch user like me, then you can download it through the ORE. But I'm going to use the app image just because that's what they actually showcase for most Linux distributions. So you can download the app image and it will actually take you to this download page and you can download it anywhere on your system. Now inside my actual Linux directory, what I have is a folder of app images on my home directory. So go right over here and I have Winimboat placed. So rightclick here, go to properties and then go to permissions and allow executing it as a program. So now to install it, it's actually a pretty simple installation. There are a few other programs you need to install which I will guide you through. This by far will be the quote unquote hardest part of the video. So, as you're installing it, the Windboat application will give you a list of prerequisites as long as you have 4 GB of RAM, which I'm sure most of you do. Uh, again, I chose to give this around 32 GB of memory. I have 128. Again, you give however much you can afford as long as you have two CPU threads, which I'm sure most of you do.
Again, don't overleverage your system.
Give enough threads, but you know, nothing more than four or six if you can spare that much. As long as you have 32 GB of free space because we are installing Windows uh as a actual operating system. So, you need to have space for that plus space for, you know, extra stuff that you're putting on this system. So, I gave it around 200 GB because I know that I'm going to be actively using this. Now, you need to have virtualization enabled, which most CPUs will have this. I don't think I've ever bought a single CPU that doesn't have this, but generally, if this is not enabled, go into your computer's BIOS settings and find an option called Intel VTD or AMD's SVM. And over there, you should be able to enable that option. It should usually come enabled by default.
And then you can just start any like then virtualization is enabled. You can play around with virtual machines beyond just this. Now, the difficult stuff would be installing Docker and Docker Compose 2. Now, depending on the version of Linux that you're on, it'll actually give you a little how like click that'll take you to the installation page for Docker. Now, here you can follow the instructions for your version of Linux, whatever flavor you're more attributed to. Since I'm on Arch Linux, I'm going to go to the Arch wiki and actually read Docker itself. Now again, you have to basically navigate whatever specific version of Linux you're using. Now, a couple weeks ago, I showed you guys that I was using Cachio OS because I really consider it to be the best gaming uh or just best Linux distribution in general at the moment. So, because I'm using Cachi, I'm going to be using Arch Linux's wiki. Now, again, there are differences even between Arch related distributions. So, again, you kind of have to know what you're doing. But here it's going to tell you install Docker.
So what you do is you start that really spooky terminal, right? And here you can actually feed it commands. So for instance, installing Docker is as simple as going to pseudo Pac-Man- capital S, which is the installation command, typing in Docker, and hitting enter. As long as you put your password in, it'll basically let you install the Docker engine. Now, since I already have it installed, I'm going to hit no. So then it's going to tell you to enable start the Docker service or the Docker socket.
So we're going to actually start the Docker service. So here you type in pseudo systemctl enable and then oh and then just because we want to make sure that this works immediately two dashes now and then of course you want to do docker.service.
So as long as you hit enter over here docker service has started. So, you might notice that it will give you a little bit of a failure if you do end up getting it if you have things like VPNs enabled. But if you don't see an error, not a big issue. Remember, read the wiki pretty thoroughly. Then it'll ask you, hey, just make sure everything works.
So, anytime you see these pound signs, that usually means you need to give an elevated command. So, inside here, you want to do pseudo docker info. Now as long as you can see this string these like you know as long as you can see docker is activated here you should be fine you should be just happy. So of course the next stage here is to install docker uh as an actual uh or docker compose v2. So going back to the installation prerequisites you can see that it also needs docker compose version two. So going back to the docker wiki you can see version 1.1. It'll tell you if you need Docker Compose, just go back to the actual terminal and do pseudo and then install whatever your command is. And provided you have the actual Docker Compose, install Docker Compose, it'll give you again this version. Make sure it's around version two and above because you need version two. And just hit install. So once that is done, you need to add yourself to the Docker user group. And it's as simple as going back to that Arch wiki and reading how to actually install your or put yourself into that group. So it says if you want to be able to run these commands without using root privileges, which you do for this program, add yourself to the Docker user group. So you can see the way that it tells you to add users to a group is through a command called as G password. So simply again because it's a uh you know a pound sign over here a hashtag if you will if you're of the new generation do pseudo gpass wd- a and of course then it's going to ask what your user is. So whatever your user is in Linux mine is my name here my last name and then of course hit space and then you want to put in a group. So the group here is obviously docker. Now once this command has been passed through and everything is done and dusted, you then have one more thing to do which again is IP tables and IP tables and installing free RDP. So whatever the instructions are with this how tab you can go down here and follow the rules with RDP. It's another program. So again as you know underneath any form of Linux you can just do pseudo Pac-Man S and then do free RDP. So, of course, put that password in, install the program, and as soon as all of that is done, restart your computer, and hopefully if nothing has gone wrong, which I don't think it should, provided you followed these steps, which is what I did, at least for Cashios, your mileage may be different for other systems, then the next step will be looking. Then the next step will be seeing that all these checks have passed. And once they've passed, you can basically hit that big purple next button. Now here it'll ask you pick the version of Windows that you need. So you can select Windows 11 or Windows 10 or whatever it has or you can actually pass a custom Windows ISO file. I would just say pick Windows 11 and then select your language and hit the big next button.
It'll actually pull the ISO file from Microsoft servers and then move forward.
Now of course the next big step is asking you what your actual like username and password is going to be.
So, enter whatever username, whatever password you want, and of course, move on forward. It'll ask you what your hardware configuration is. So, again, pass it two, four, maybe six cores, however you can leverage. Don't pass more cores than you physically have.
Otherwise, you can actually harm the performance rather than help it. Of course, when it comes to RAM, give it all you can really give. Uh, I could give it 16, 30. I could even give it 64 gigs, but whatever amount you can spare is fine. Now, depending on what you do, let's say that all you're doing is Microsoft Office [ __ ] then you probably don't need a crazy amount of RAM. But let's say you're going to be playing around with some Photoshop, maybe Lightroom, FL Studio, anything creative, you might want to bump those numbers up.
And then, of course, for disk size, however much you can spare, again, depending on what you're doing, productivity usually requires more. Give it whatever tailor to your needs. Okay?
Then of course once all of these things are set you can then hit the big install and now it'll actually go through this process. Now here you can load up any game you want play it while you wait.
This process takes about an hour because it's basically installing Windows and using your web browser you can actually patch into the Docker container and see it installing as you're you know you can see a detailed progress. Basically Windows just has to install. So, as you let the system cook over here, you'll eventually reach the actual desktop if you've been monitoring it. But once that entire process is done, ladies and gentlemen, you now have Windboat functioning. So, to show you how Windboat actually functions over here, I actually have the program ready to go.
At your home directory, you'll see your Windows installation or your container rather. And provided everything works fine, these two boxes should be green.
So, you can stop the container at any moment and you can start it. You can set it so that it runs on boot. So for instance in your configuration you can modify RAM CPU at any moment. You can enable a shared home folder so you can put files in and out of your actual like system you know pretty seamlessly. And then of course you can make sure that you can either start the container as your system boots or you can personally choose to start whenever you need. And then of course there's also experimental features like USB pass through which we'll touch upon a little bit later. And then of course you've got a bunch of experimental features, some that are, you know, may maybe they'll be here, maybe they won't. You've got smart card pass through, all that stuff. But let's show you how this magic works. So hit that big old play button and start up your actual container. And it should take a few minutes depending on like, you know, not really a few minutes. You can see that the container is running.
And the moment that Windboat guest API goes green, you're good to go. So inside the apps list over here, you can see that I have a whole bunch of applications. And what this does is when you install applications to this, it'll also reflect itself here. So I've already installed things like uh Comet browser, Photoshop, I've already got a bunch of other web browsers, FL Studio, so on and so forth. So if we click that big Windows desktop button, you can see that it actually blows up an entire desktop for us. So here you can see that my system is functioning. It's used free RDP to bring an entire Windows desktop that I can patch in at any moment. So again, let's fire up an actual program.
So when you have something like this, you can actually use this tool set to fire up a bunch of browsers and install programs. This is the system you're going to be jumping into when you want to download things. Like for instance, let's say you wanted to, I don't know, install the Adobe Creative Cloud. You can fire up uh Microsoft Edge and just download it within this and then of course once you have it downloaded you can install it and then do all of your setup initially from here. Yeah, Photoshop is firing up on my actual Linux system uh pretty much seamlessly.
Now here's where the caveats kind of come into especially if you're in the creative field. You can see that Photoshop is actually fired up and of course I've you know have a I have a little image right over here. You can click there and ladies and gentlemen, Photoshop just works because sometimes the RDP can have a bit of an issue especially with certain graphical related applications. But you can see like in some in in many cases it just works pretty much out of the box underneath this virtual machine system.
And of course I would say that for most Photoshop people, this is going to be a pretty fine uh thing. There's also obviously Lightroom for anybody that wants to play around with it. And this is where limitations come into it. So obviously Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects are probably not going to run uh as smooth. You can actually see that there is lag in this. I'm not trying to sell you this as like a perfect replacement, but there is going to be some lag in the story because obviously, as you can see, like moving things around, it is kind of laggy because we are using free RDP and it's not really meant to be like any uh it's not really meant for use in cases like this because there's no real GPU acceleration. But I think for a lot of people who are playing around with this stuff, it's a start and you know, it's not really what the end product of this will look like down the road. But yeah, it's crazy to see that you can run at least some of these production apps on your system. Now, obviously, one of the comments that I ended up getting in my video, for instance, was this one right over here, where one user said, "A video about how to run Windows supported software on Linux would be amazing." Well, you're getting it right here. I use Metabang to draw, but I don't think it's ever going to come to Linux, and the Linux friendly alternatives are really difficult for me to get used to, which is a really good point, right?
Like even though that software is, you know, free, even though there's some free and open- source alternatives, obviously there's a lot of people that will say, "I can never get rid of After Effects, I can never truly get rid of Photoshop, no matter how hard I try." And that might be true for a lot of cases. So, I went to Metabang, the actual paint, uh, you know, uh, software that this user was saying, and it looks pretty interesting. So, of course, obviously, it's only available for Windows and Mac. So, I decided, sure, I'll download it, install it, and ladies and gentlemen, here we've got Metabang Baint Pro running underneath this system. So, by hitting it up and firing it, you can see that this works pretty well. It's given me a little ad. I'll skip through the ad. I'll skip through all of this, but yes, I fired up this program, and it seems like it works. So, what's really actually interesting about this too is you can open up files and it'll actually open up the Windows um it'll actually open up the Windows um uh the Windows Explorer. And again, this is all RDP bringing up the virtual machine in pieces as it needs to. So, I'm going to fire up this program that I brought over here, this little image.
And of course, you can modify it and do whatever it is to your heart's content.
Now, for people that use things like drawing tablets, for instance, remember Windboat has the ability for you to pass through certain devices. So, if you can pass through your drawing tablet through the USB pass through for instance, you could actually have it connected to this program and and that goes for Photoshop or really any other creative tool as well. In fact, that goes for, you know, let's say you need to use Microsoft Teams or let's say you need to use Zoom for instance, which doesn't natively work from my understanding underneath on Linux. So, you can pass through a camera, you can pass through a microphone, and you can use this as a way for, you know, communications if people that you're working with are using software that doesn't natively work underneath Linux, especially if you want it to just seamlessly work out of the box. So, what about people that are on FL Studio? Well, there are options for you, too. So, you can see in the case of FL Studio, it just works underneath Linux through this method effectively as if it was running seamlessly on Windows. Now, I'm not an expert when it comes to something like FL Studio. So, again, uh depending on how you use this, your mileage may vary.
But I think for most people who are experiencing it and the fact that the compatibility list is so high here because we're just again virtualizing Windows, it's really not a shock that it runs as good as it does. Remember this is not using line. This is directly running Linux underneath or not Linux but this is running Windows in a virtual machine and just patching that through as we need. So I guess ultimately for those people that are like damn I really need Microsoft Word. So you can click on Microsoft Word and access it as if it was natively running. So here Word has fired up on my actual system. It's telling me to sign in. So again, you can just sign in over here and feed it your Microsoft account. Now remember, this is a virtual machine. So again, you know, if you're running malware underneath this, remember the credentials you're running within it could possibly be compromised. So again, if you're using this for serious stuff, treat this about as carefully as you treat your home system. Anyways, and of course, obviously for anybody wondering too, yes, there are ways for you to fire up your web browser. So, let's say you want to use the internet underneath this virtual machine and pass it through. You have a whole repertoire of different actual uh, you know, web browsers you can install and feed through. But that's about what covers all of it, ladies and gentlemen. Obviously, there are some caveats. Uh, you know, if you're thinking, man, could I run those, you know, anti-che enabled games underneath this? you absolutely cannot because remember this is still a virtual machine and it also doesn't really have, you know, GPU acceleration. So trying to game with this is just not something that I would consider actually worthwhile for productivity or the programs that I've shown you. It's actually pretty damn good. Now again, if you're somebody that still needs Microsoft Windows and you want to run it underneath your actual like Linux system, there is obviously still virtual machines that you can pass GPUs to. Now, there's a whole repertoire of single GPU or various GPU pass through solutions.
I've made several videos on this, but again, I can always pass through my graphics card and switch it between a virtual machine and Linux. And let's say I wanted to game underneath this or actually use Adobe Creative Cloud like the, you know, After Effects and Premiere Pro, then I could do this. And what's interesting is obviously with Windows 11 because there are, you know, things going into the future where it has unsupported hardware requirements, you can actually fire up a virtual machine and pass through some of the requirements like an emulated version of a TPM and kind of get Windows 11 running underneath unsupported hardware all without Windows necessarily knowing. But look, I was reading literally like the other day that Microsoft Windows is getting rid of a whole bunch of local install like uh features. You know, just a bunch of stuff that we really did take for granted. They're really trying to push Windows into this constant internet AI connected [ __ ] And for those users who are trying to wean themselves off, this video is important because I think it gives you guys a little bit of a uh, you know, understanding. It gives you a little bit of a exit or at least an extra tool in your arsenal to be able to move over to Linux smoothly. I'm not making these videos because I just want you to jump onto Linux and then hate the entire process because you miss a bunch of programs and video games. I want to make things really realistic and I want to show you tools that you can use that make it so that the switch isn't really all that difficult. Okay, to be honest with you, it really shouldn't need to be. But I do understand for some people they got to have that one specific application and now you have a way to basically run almost every single Windows application underneath Linux and have it looking as pretty as it possibly can in the process. Ladies and gentlemen, this is mear and if you like what you saw, please like, comment, and subscribe. Dislike if you dislike it. M out.
i didn't mean the full video in word.. just a brief overview

i should've stated it XD
last I tried Linux, one of the most important apps for me, HWMonitor , couldn't run on Linux
Probably something similar to proton and how you can basically get windows games running in linux by building their own self contained environment so as far as they are concerned they are in windows. Something similar but that works even for service apps like Photoshop that need an online component for full functionally is what the video is about.
Originally posted by GigaCars:
i didn't mean the full video in word.. just a brief overview

i should've stated it XD

omg that was funny though
im not reading that short story.
even if i did it still cant play my multiplayer games
someone teach me how to xbox pcpass on linux then ill be impressed
Elllis 7 Oct @ 4:48pm 
Can Linux run UWP apps? If not, the video is misleading
Originally posted by Elllis:
Can Linux run UWP apps? If not, the video is misleading

That's what I expected it to mean. If not you're right brother.
Originally posted by =J.DAY= THE TERMINATOR 2:
someone teach me how to xbox pcpass on linux then ill be impressed
You log into your microsoft account, then navigate to the gamepass section, then select the cancel gamepass button.

It's super easy, barely an inconvenience.
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