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Comment by ykonstant | Hacker News Reader

How good is running Windows in a VM with a Linux host nowadays? Does it work well for office users who want to run Office? How about people who want to run Adobe or Autodesk software? These use cases seem to be causing the most friction for the transition in my circles (apart from gaming, which is a different story).

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Steam/Valve made a point of running Windows games under Linux as good or better as under.Windows. that is, Wine and Proton are really good these days.

Running genuine MS Windows® in a VM is very possible but much less necessary than, say, 10 years ago, if you want to run some non-esoteric Windows software. It also technically requires a license.

They asked about Office, Adobe, and Autodesk. I’d say the situation is still the opposite there. In the early 00s, you could run Microsoft Office etc. pretty well with CrossOver Office and the likes. But these applications barely work anymore if at all, most likely because their complexity increased a lot over the years.

Using a Windows VM is a pretty good solution. Though last time I tried only commercial solutions like VMWare work very well, because KVM-based solutions didn’t have great graphics support. Maybe VirtualBox is better, but Oracle.

These days they tend to work very well, and if you're rich you can even redirect a spare GPU with a screen directly.

Interesting about KVM limitations, because I am constrained to use that. VirtualBox... yes indeed, Oracle.

If you have the hardware for it, VFIO setups can be amazing. I've been running graphics accelerated Windows inside a VM for a few months now, and apart for some random crashes, it's perfect.

I've been using Capture One (lightroom alternative) and Affinity Photo 2 inside the VM and it's been great.

Haven't really tried video editing, but it might not be as great.

How exactly does graphic acceleration work when you run a VM? Do you need two graphic cards (one for the host, another for the guest)?

Edit: to contribute a little to the grandparent question - I have Windows on QEMU for the Office suite and it works pretty smoothly. I had to make some config changes, most of them outlined in these reddit threads:

https://www.reddit.com/r/qemu_kvm/comments/18z8609/qemu_wind...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChromeOSFlex/comments/ucno4b/qemukv...

I also disabled animations in Windows settings because everything felt clunky.

No crashes, clipboard and shared folders work fine after installing guest tools.

Very good info, I am also planning to set something up over QEMU.

As a 20 year full-time Linux desktop user doing Enterprise IT consulting, running a windoze VM has never NOT been an entirely functional experience for me.

I've used both QEMU and Virtualbox to run them, mostly Virtuabox (yes, oracle sucks, it was still sun when I started), and probably the most demanding things I do on it is Visio, which I use for some very complex design docs in windows it general struggles with already. I used windoze xp in vm for ages even past its date of expiration, basically until newer Visio's no longer supported it, and all windows versions tried (7 and 10) have worked fine outside their own UI quirks.

I don't even enable 3d drivers, or try to make it do graphics-heavy things. Everything else I can do fully in Linux (including gaming), and this has been in supporting most any and every sort of enterprise across those years in technology.

Anyone that tells you Linux can't/doesn't work is being obstinate, ignorant, or lazy.

VMWare works really well for me, as do Proton and Lutris for Linux gaming. That said, I'm a software developer so not a typical user.

I'm not a professional Office user, but I personally found OnlyOffice to be a very suitable replacement (you can get the FOSS version on Flathub)

Depends on how powerful your machine is

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