Linux is fine for gaming, Wine and Proton have come a long way. But what about Windows apps that don't play well with Wine?
That's kind of what WinBoat aims to fix. It's not merely an emulator, it's a virtual machine that uses a containerized approach in Docker or Podman.
These are WinBoat's system requirements
- RAM: At least 4 GB of RAM
- CPU: At least 2 CPU threads
- Storage: At least 32 GB free space on your hard drive.
That's on par for a virtual machine. I guess it's kind of the opposite of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). So it's LSW?
Anyway, you can download the app from GitHub or from https://www.winboat.app/. It is free, and open source under the MIT license.
WinBoat is an Electron app. Yeah, yeah, I know! When you run the app, you'll see a prerequisites screen. This in my opinion could be a hurdle for many users.
The first thing you'll need to do is enable KVM from your BIOS/UEFI for virtualization. I already have QEMU/KVM/Virt Manager which I use sparingly for a Windows 11 VM. Next, you'll need to install Docker, and the Docker Compose v2. After that you have to add your user to the docker group, and also setup FreeRDP for Remote Desktop. That's a lot of stuff to set up, and some of these are complicated. I think these might scare users away from trying the app. Fortunately, you can just click on one of the "How" links, and it'll help you find instructions for everything. They are mostly help documentation hosted on Docker's portal. WinBoat does not support Docker Desktop.
Since I'm using Linux Mint, I followed the instructions to set up Docker on Ubuntu. It takes a bit of time, but once you got it set up, it should look like this.
Proceed with the installation of the VM in WinBoat. You'll be asked to select the version of Windows that you want to use, and optionally select a custom ISO.
Set up a user account for Windows, customize the virtual hardware, allow home directory sharing (if required). Once you have finalized the options, WinBoat will start installing Windows in the container. You can check on the progress using your web browser too.
Note: The installation failed for me once, but worked when I retried it.
WinBoat will boot into Windows, except you won't see a visual representation of Windows. The Home tab is where you can pause the emulation, stop it (shut it down), and also check on the CPU, RAM and Disk usage. Nothing fancy here, let's move on to the Apps tab. This is where the interesting stuff is. Click on an app here to launch it, e.g. File Explorer, Task Manager, Notepad, etc. They open like a native app on Linux, because there is no Windows GUI. It's kind of cool. You can of course access the Windows Desktop too.
As for installing apps, just download a setup file (e.g. an EXE) for the program you want and install it as you would normally. You can install whatever you want. The program will appear in WinBoat's Apps tab and you can launch it.
I chose to test some free Windows-exclusive apps that I had used in the past, namely Notepad++, ShareX. But I've seen many users reporting that they were able to get Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office running on their Linux machines with WinBoat.
Switch to the configuration tab in WinBoat to customize the virtual hardware, or to manage the app's settings such as Display Scaling, App Scaling, Multi-Monitor Support, Smartcard Passthrough, RDP Monitoring, etc.
In terms of performance, WinBoat's Desktop experience was slower than my Virt Manager setup. But the apps worked. That's the important thing, it's a functional virtual machine. I don't think it is a good idea to leave the container running all the time, using up system resources. Turn it off when you don't need it.
Wine is far mature (pun intended), and has way better support. But it's nice to have an alternative, even if it is not particularly user-friendly to set up. WinBoat might be useful for Windows 10 users who are on the fence about jumping ship to Linux, but need to run some Windows apps for work or personal use.
Over a billion users are still using Windows 10, half of these PCs do not meet the requirements to upgrade to Windows 11.
Have you tried WinBoat?
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