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Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

It's funny because I remember in 2014 before WSL, certain hypervisors like VMWare Player had the ability to run Linux apps in Windows using "unity" mode allowing Linux apps to be seamlessly blended in as regular Windows windows, complete with window decorations, alt tab, shortcuts, etc.. It worked well for what it did, I ran Sublime Text 2 back then in that way and other tools.

This looks like an evolution of that, but in reverse.

I wonder what the performance is like. Has anyone tried it on CPU / GPU intensive apps like video editing tools?

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I'm pretty sure you can do the same with Windows apps in Linux, since you can basically do the same with VirtualBox seamless mode too. It only requires installing the "guest additions" drivers - there's no container involved. The only major issues I see there are precisely with alt-tab - you cycle through your host windows, then suddenly ALL guest ones (and you're stuck in the guest until you press right Ctrl) - why is it so difficult to make alt-tab flow inside and outside the VM - at least in seamless mode?

Yep, VirtualBox had it too with guest additions. Once VMWare Player stopped receiving updates I switched over to it.

Since WSL became a thing I stopped using this method since getting a "native" Linux terminal through Windows was enough for me for most things.

Although now that Windows 10 is not receiving updates and my hardware can't run Windows 11, and RAM prices alone cost almost as much as my entire computer did 10 years ago I'm going to be switching to native Linux and not look back, even if it means losing certain video editing capabilities and certain games.

The idea of blending applications is as old as X Windows servers on Windows like Hummingbird, although it wasn't virtualization, the remote X Windows applications would blend on the desktop.

Thanks to search being trash there was a probject that let you run basically remote apps Linux to windows ie run the apps on a Linux host and the ux is handled on the windows client as a seamless local app. I think it mostly worked. I have no idea what the project was called and none of it was beyond alpha but it seemed really cool and possibly useful more than ever now

That is basically X Windows, unless I am misunderstanding the description.

X Windows server is the part that runs on the client.

Hummingbird nowadays has a different name,

https://www.rocketsoftware.com/en-us/products/remote-access/...

There are also other options like X Win32,

https://www.starnet.com/xwin32/

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