Windows On Linux, The Clever Way

I didn’t think I’d be writing this, but I am running the latest version of Photoshop on my Linux machine, and I got it to work with access to a dedicated mobile GPU on my laptop. I didn’t think it’d be possible, but here we are.

Admittedly, virtual machines—layers of operating systems on top of the layer you’re currently using—are nothing new in the Linux community. This would be a bit of a nothingburger as a result, except for one thing: I was able to set it up using the built-in windowing system in GNOME. I use the PaperWM extension to drag and move my windows at will, and shockingly enough, my panels from Windows could hang with my Linux windows. Mostly.

And I could run some pretty heavy-duty apps this way. Photoshop more or less worked. It was interesting running a Windows version of Vivaldi next to a Linux version. And some of the apps I’ve really been missing from my Linux experience—particularly, InDesign? I got them to load on my HP Envy 16, a laptop with a sufficiently beefy Intel i7-12700H with 32 gigs of RAM, which is probably the caliber of machine you want to even try this.

What was this voodoo that I did on my computer? Simply put, it’s an open-source project called WinApps. Effectively, this tool slices and dices a virtual machine into the Linux desktop using the Remote Desktop Protocol, without even sweating. I found a guide to do it in Bazzite—and within an hour, I had the Explorer app running next to the GNOME Files app.

(Okay, there is some sweating involved. You are going to be in the command line, heavily tweaking files. But the payoff may be worth it for you.)

This is not a totally new idea—Parallels has a “coherence mode” in its MacOS app, for example, that’s essentially a more polished version of this—but if this works, it’s presumably a godsend to a bunch of laptop jockeys whose desire for more flexibility and software freedom has run headfirst into the reality that they occasionally need these monolithic tools.

The tool specifically promotes itself as a way to use both Adobe Creative Cloud apps and Microsoft Office 365 apps. These apps, in particular, have been the ones that have been difficult to fully replace with alternatives, and Adobe’s tools in particular have proven more challenging than most to replace for many users.

Over the last couple of years, I invested in the Adobe suite because I felt like I had to. After all, if I suddenly needed access to InDesign and I didn’t have it, I’d be out a good freelance gig or having to drop bank suddenly. (Free piece of advice: Buy it from Amazon, where you can easily cancel it, unlike on Adobe’s website, which makes you go through hoops.)

But my frustrations with the Apple ecosystem and a desire to embrace FOSS kind of led me to look for alternatives. And I will say, having to boot back into Windows just to work in these apps is a huge pain. I’ve periodically looked for solutions to this problem, having focused on the popular Windows translation layer WINE. Though that only works with very old versions of the Adobe suite—and previously I have taken to running a portable version of Photoshop CS6 I downloaded from the Internet Archive. (The competing Affinity suite, for what it’s worth, is a little more WINE-friendly.)

So, put simply, I’m the target audience for this. How does it work? If I were to give a top-line review, I would say this: This is more for dabbling, less for real work. It’s impressive how well it works, but it’s being rendered in software, even when a GPU gets passed through, so it’s slow.

And that’s not even getting into the bugs, of which there are many. While Photoshop loaded more or less fine, it seemed to struggle with cursor-dragging in some cases, and sometimes struggled to draw text boxes.

InDesign was worse. It defied my monitor setup’s position conventions in a pretty comical way. But that’s still a lot better than what InDesign (and Creative Cloud in general) does in WINE these days.

So maybe, despite the promise of flexibility, it’s not quite ready to replace your dedicated Windows partition. Lightweight programs are the sweet spot of WinApps. But it’s still hugely impressive.

Is it a regular-person tool? No way; it takes too long to hack it into workable shape. But if it was packaged a little better and didn’t require a command line, I could see it. It feels like this has all the parts for a “Steam for productivity,” which would make high-end commercial Windows apps accessible in Linux without a lot of fuss, like Parallels does on the Mac. That could help draw in even more of the Linux-curious, just like Steam does.

WINE has been great for the Linux ecosystem, but the WinApps team’s decision to think about the problem inside-out has led to a cool solution that needs more attention. It felt like the closest I could see myself working in Adobe apps on Linux in a long time. (That said, I am going to build the images for this in Krita. I’m locked in to that app at this point.)

To close out, this tool exists because of hard work done by a number of open-source teams, including at Red Hat, whose virtual desktop drivers for Windows are essential to WinApps’ working in the first place. (I was able to install this through the Docker-esque container management tool Podman, also a Red Hat-forged project; it also supports libvirt, a common virtualization tool in Linux-land, which I used to get the GPU passthrough working.)

WinApps represents a mechanism for which the parts all exist, but the glue to bind it all together is still being formulated. As long as the interest is there, we’ll get there—and eventually people who don’t like modifying config files will get it, too.

As janky and broken as this currently is, it is absolutely the most exciting thing I’ve seen on Linux thus far. Fingers crossed for the future.