For some reason I read it as WinBloat at first. Cool none the less, will make it easier to make my friends transition.
On my Linux Mint laptop Winboat installed quickly and allowed me to install and run the one program I use that requires Windows. This biggest issues were with that same app’s windows when they were rendered on the Linux desktop. They sometimes couldn’t be moved, resized or closed, however the same app ran just fine on the Winboat Windows Desktop itself.
The latest version is identified as an alpha release on the UI, so these problems aren’t surprising. What is surprising is how well so much of this works for an alpha release, particularly how polished the installation process is.
Looking forward to using Winboat when it progresses to the beta.
I wonder how well this runs AutoCad and adobe
How it is different from WinApps?
From their FAQ
With WinApps you do the bulk of the setup manually, and there’s no cohesive interface to bring it all together. There’s a basic TUI, a taskbar widget, and some CLI commands for you to play with.
WinBoat does all the setup once you have the pre-requisites installed, displays everything worth seeing in a neat interface for you, and acts like a complete experience. No need to mess with configuration files, no need to memorize a dozen CLI commands, it just works.
But if it isn’t dependant on the command line is it really Linux?
(This is an awesome project, thanks for sharing)
Listen, I only need to know one thing: can it run Paint.\NET?
Because pretty much all my needs are met but
GOOD GOD THE SELECTION FOR GENERAL-USE RASTER EDITING SOFTWARE ON LINUX IS BALLS.
(inb4 anyone says anything: Krita = painting not editing; GIMP = sucks balls; PhotoGIMP = sucks less balls; Pinta sucks balls ever since they switched to GTK4; and pretty much all other options are MS Paint equivalents so also all suck balls.)
Have you tried Photopea? It’s browser based but very good
I definitely don’t mind trying new things, but that site says it’s a photo editor. A photo editor is not at all the same thing as a general-use raster editor like Pinta, GIMP, or Paint.\NET.
As far as I’m aware Photopea is supposed to fill the same niche as GIMP or Photoshop, though I’m no expert in the field.
Can I ask you what “sucks” about GIMP?
Okay, so, please forgive me ahead of time for the following rant. To be blunt, you did ask. 😛
- It often doesn’t use common UI/UX conventions found in most other editors
- It has no polygon tools.
- The Lasso tool is called “Free Select” instead of, you know, “Lasso” like every other software under the sun calls it. (Though I admit this in itself is merely a nitpick, it is indicative of the larger trends.)
- The text tool is so bad. Honestly, I don’t even know how to put how it’s bad into words, but just using it is…painful…in comparison to Paint.\NET, Pinta, or even MS Paint back on Windows. Other people can probably word the problems with it better than I can. Sorry I can’t be more descriptive.
- It doesn’t have Lanczos resampling for resizing images (tbf neither do many others but still Paint.\NET does and so that’s a point against it. (If you don’t know, Lanczos is visibly superior in maintaining fidelity when downscaling an image, compared to linear, bilinear, cubic, etc.)
- The currently active layer seems to randomly change, so that one minute you’re doing something and the next nothing is worked, you wonder “what the hell” and then finally after 10 minutes of searching you find out it’s because the layer has changed and now you need to go click on this one obscure option. (I don’t remember what it is.
Select > Select Nonemaybe? Anyway, I’ve had it happen where the option doesn’t even do anything.) It completely throws my whole game off and I’ve never once, even once had it happen until I started using GIMP. - The default UI/UX is very rough around the edges. Just to make it minimally usable for me, I had to install PhotoGIMP over GIMP and spend 20-30 minutes customizing the layout and keyboard shortcuts. Speaking of…
- The default keyboard shortcuts are kinda wacko. For example, Zoom In, Zoom Out, and Fit Image in Window (basically zooming in/out but to see the whole image in your window) is
+,-, andShift+Ctrl+E, respectively; while most other programs have it asctrl++;(and/orctrl+=),ctrl+-(and/orctrl+NumpadMinus), andctrl+0(and/orctrl+NumpadEnter). Also, you cannot usetaborctrl+tabto move to the next or previous tab, respectively, becausetabis a excluded key for keyboard shortcuts. (I think I was once told it has to do with a limitation in GTK, but that’s ridiculous as Pinta has been able to do it for years.) There are countless other inane defaults for the keyboard shortcuts as well, frankly. - You cannot use
LMBorRMBto switch between the primary and secondary colors selected. You have to useX.
These are only a few of the most severe frustrations, annoyances, and hair-pulling-out moments for me with regards to GIMP. I’d never have even tried it out if Pinta hadn’t made the ass-backwards decision to move to the stupidly minimalistic and less functional GTK4 adwaita UI and if Paint.\NET worked. (I can’t remember why it doesn’t wanna work; I think it has to do with a dependency. I know it’s not the .NET framework since that could be handled by Mono IIRC.)
Hey valid complaints. As someone not in the need for professional editing tools i felt I’d be better to ask than to assume! Thank you for sharing
It’s no trouble! I’m happy to explain! ^_^
90% of the complaints I’ve heard about GIMP are just because its UI and workflow are different from whatever tool they’re used to. I like GIMP just fine because I learned on it. I
Gimp is heavy in my opinion, no matter the desktop I opened it on It always takes a while to fully open. If I want to make a quick change to an image, crop, draw or write on I don’t want to sit for 5 minutes for the editor to open.
iirc gimp tools weren’t all that beginner friendly either.
it is indeed pretty slow to start, but after that it’s pretty fast and doesn’t use much memory. I’ve used it heavily on my core2duo macbook (cpu capped to 800mhz due to no battery) until a few years ago.
Krita solves at least your second problem. I love Krita
I’m with you. I love paint.net. For me it’s not even necessarily the feature set, but the fact that it starts up instantly unlike others. Most of the time I’m using it to make a quick meme and having to wait for something like GIMP to open makes me feel like it’s not worth making.
Kolorpaint is decent if you don’t care about layers.
Kolorpaint is decent if you don’t care about layers.
How do you do any kind of work without having layers?
I use it almost exclusively to resize images (smooth scaling is good) and draw red squares around text.
I’ve tried it and it’s a little too barebones for my needs.
I also do, unfortunately, care about layers.
But I appreciate the suggestion! <3
I use Pinta and it’s amazing for an easy paint replacement.
Why are there non breaking spaces?
Because there doesn’t seem to be any other way to have line breaks show up. Lol.
See? This line is actually separated after the above one by two lines.
You can end a line with a backslash to have single line line breaks.
Lemmy just uses markdown, so any good guide for that should be able to help you:
https://www.markdownguide.org/basic-syntax/#line-breaksIf you can’t find a specific thing, just searching “how to x in markdown” in your preferred search engine should net you an answer if x is supported.
There are also many markdown editors that can be run either locally or through a browser; these can be useful if you want to test some syntax without putting any mistakes in the eyes of the public. I like Obsidian for local editing and usually recommend this one for online testing.
Hope all that helps!
Now I wonder if I dual boot linux / windows, why is there no software that can basically use my existing windows installation from another partition to run windows software (like, maybe load it into VM or something)?
You can. You can boot a windows partition in a VM. IIRC it is not really advisable but you can do it.
I actually find that starting a ‘raw disk partition’ virtual machine for Windows is one of the best ways to run it. Stops it from fucking up your BIOS and EFI when it does an update. You can restart into it when you want the ‘native GPU’ for games.
Of course, the even better way to stop Windows from fucking up your hardware is to not allow it anywhere near your hardware in the first place…
Was working for me well for years in the past, can recommend.
you can run windows software on a windows partition using wine, but it is extremely brittle, since you’re going from a case-insensitive windows file system as well.
Another problem would be the dependencies and initial configuration would not be present unless the software was built with portability in mind
i was thinking maybe a hypothetical “global wine” could use the windows drive itself as its
drive_c, which would bypass that issue.
Parallels on Mac OS lets you do that with the Windows partition. I know VMware and other virtualization tools let you mount a physical disk into a VM so it should be possible. It’s just kinda janky, and Windows doesn’t always like it when you switch from physical to virtual.
It would be wonderful to have something like parrallels.
Has anyone got this working on bazzite by chance? Any additional steps necessary? Winapps didn’t work for me, so looking for an alternative
It should work, maybe not out of the box. But if you make sure KVM is enabled. And you have docker, docker-compose, freerdp and iptables installed. And you have added your user to the docker group.
Then the app should work
Why not worked it basically same thing just different interface
Weird to compare it to Wine instead of Cassowary
https://github.com/casualsnek/cassowary
Since both are just running Windows in a VM
Wine is a translator tho.
I’m guessing that’s why it’s weird
ehh, tried using it . . . and a
failed to create network winboat_default: Error response from daemon: all predefined address pools have been fully subnettedhappens. I’ll create a github issue, but at this point, I could have installed a full windows vm in less time than I spent troubleshooting this issue . . . so there’s that
wonder if theyll add flathub
While I respect that you want more apps you use into the same package manager. I may be wrong, but its my understanding that they dont accept docker containers on flathub. I don’t even know it is possible to run docker inside a flatpak or if its possible if it would conflict with docker on the host. Docker or podman requires kernel features like cgroup which I belive flatpak sandboxes away.
At the very least you need docker or podman and kvm and pass these from the host into the flatpak
I really like having all or most apps in one or max two package managers on my computer. But I think this is a case where you might have to concede installing this piece of software without a flatpak
There is a Windows only video confrencing app that I need to use for work. Would this work ok?
I wonder if it can connect to my laptops webcam and microhpone. I also wonder if there would be a delay in the video and audio streams.
Webcam is just USB device, you can passthru that to the VM and it will work. Microphone is part of your onboard audio device, but it can probably be configured somehow to also expose microphone on an emulated audio device inside vm, but idk
The good thing is, it’s all free software (*), so you can just try.
(*) Windows is free, because you almost certainly have a license with your pc which you can use in the vm too if your pc runs linux.
Could we get something similar to windows?
WSL?
18/f/cali?
Please god, no.
hey, that was good.
Would this work with MAGIX VEGAS??
Docker based windows seems like an odd choice when qemu exists. Will check it out to see how it bloats on resources. I have a couple work apps that won’t work in WINE but are fine in qemu.
How is this different from Wine?
We have Wine / Proton of course and they can run a lot, but not everything is possible. WinBoat is different. Instead of running compatibility layers, it runs a real copy of Windows using Docker and KVM under the hood. The developer explains it should run basically everything unless “it requires strong GPU acceleration or kernel-level anticheat”. It uses FreeRDP for showing the apps on your Linux desktop, enabling you to interact with them like you would with any other Linux app.
I don’t want to sound rude, but maybe read the article and not just the headline before asking questions
