WinBoat FFFFF/Features/sssss
Elegant Interface
WinBoat provides a sleek and intuitive interface that seamlessly integrates Windows into your Linux desktop environment, making it feel like a native experience.
Automated Installs
Installing Windows via WinBoat is a delightfully simple process all done through our interface. Pick your preferences & specs and let us handle the rest.
Run Any App
If it runs on Windows, it can run on WinBoat. Enjoy the full range of Windows applications, from productivity tools to entertainment, all within your Linux environment as native OS-level windows.
Filesystem Integration
Accessing your Linux filesystem from Windows is a breeze. Your home directory is mounted in Windows, allowing you to easily share files between the two systems without any hassle.
And many more...
There's tons more you can do with WinBoat, for example smartcard passthrough and resource monitoring. We're always looking to add more features, so stay tuned for updates!
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Elegant Interface
WinBoat provides a sleek and intuitive interface that seamlessly integrates Windows into your Linux desktop environment, making it feel like a native experience.
Automated Installs
Installing Windows via WinBoat is a delightfully simple process all done through our interface. Pick your preferences & specs and let us handle the rest.
Run Any App
If it runs on Windows, it can run on WinBoat. Enjoy the full range of Windows applications, from productivity tools to entertainment, all within your Linux environment as native OS-level windows.
Filesystem Integration
Accessing your Linux filesystem from Windows is a breeze. Your home directory is mounted in Windows, allowing you to easily share files between the two systems without any hassle.
And many more...
There's tons more you can do with WinBoat, for example smartcard passthrough and resource monitoring. We're always looking to add more features, so stay tuned for updates!
DDDD/Download/ddddd
We're excited to have you onboard! Pick your platform below to get started with WinBoat within minutes, not hours.
CCCC/Contribute/eeeee
WinBoat is an open-source project licensed under MIT, and we welcome contributions from the community. Whether you're a developer, designer, or just someone who loves WinBoat, there are many ways you can help us improve and grow.
CCCC/Community/yyyyy
We usually hang out on Discord, come join and chat with us!
FFFFF/Frequently Asked Questions/sssss
How does it compare to WinApps?
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.
What are the advantages of using this over CrossOver or WINE?
You can run stuff that doesn't play well with CrossOver or WINE, and have a full Windows desktop at the same time.
We've had numerous apps that weren't working nicely (or at all) in Wine, this is one of the reasons we've created WinBoat. Some examples would be Affinity Photo, Paint Tool Sai v1.0, the entire Adobe suite, AeroChat, Acrobat, and of course Office.
Will I be able to configure my peripherals / hardware using WinBoat?
If your peripheral / hardware uses USB to connect to your device. then yes! Starting from WinBoat 0.8.0 we support USB passthrough as an experimental feature and you can use any Windows software needed for configuration, it should work out of the box.
Is there USB passthrough?
Yes! Starting from WinBoat 0.8.0 we support USB passthrough as an experimental feature. Please give it a try and let us know what you think! 😄
If for whatever reason you're stuck with an older version of WinBoat, you can modify the docker-compose.yml file in ~/.winboat once you finished setting up WinBoat. You can add the appropriate USB devices like this, followed by executing docker-compose down and docker-compose up -d in the same folder. Please make sure to remove these changes before you upgrade to >=0.8.0 though, as they are incompatible with our implementation.
Is there GPU passthrough?
Not at the moment, but we plan on eventually implementing GPU acceleration through paravirtualized drivers.
We have looked at MVisor Win VGPU Driver for OpenGL, which seems promising from our tests, but it's for a different hypervisor (not compatible with QEMU). Some other folks are also working on DirectX drivers but nothing that we can try out yet.
We have also looked into Looking Glass extensively, specifically their Indirect Display Driver which does not need a second GPU, because it'd be absolutely amazing to have it. We got the driver to compile and start via some hacks, but couldn't get much more than a black screen. The developer says it is not ready for general use yet at all, however we plan to integrate it once it is ready.
Does it run games with anti-cheat that don't run on Linux?
Unfortunately running games with kernel anti-cheat is not possible, as they block virtualization.
Any possibility of adding Podman support as a Docker alternative?
Podman support is planned. We tried working on it, some contributors also tried working on it, but there's some issues with networking (specifically the guest server being unreachable) that prevent it from being functional for now.
Will you make it into a Flatpak?
This is on our to-do list, but it'll take some effort because Flatpak is pretty isolated from the rest of the system and apps, so we'd have to find a way to expose installed apps, the Docker binary, and the Docker socket, and many other utilities.