3 Ways To Run Your Favorite Windows Software On Linux
There’s always some piece of software you wish worked on Linux but there’s no native version. It’s understandable, but still disappointing…
That disappointment brings many smart minds together to solve the problem of incompatible software. Today I want to go through 3 amazing pieces of software that range from very simple but somewhat limited, to sophisticated but amazing.
- Most User-Friendly: Virtualbox
Virtualbox is very popular virtualization software allowing any person to setup a virtual machine “emulating” hardware to run other operating systems. Setup is very easy and streamlined with bare minimum of options and built-in explanations for every setup option. Even if you find yourself confused there’s a lot of videos on platforms such as YouTube explaining and showing setup process. It’s open-source and widely available, and popular enough to have thousands of pages of documentation in every language and simplification.
It’s easiest to setup and perhaps most “compatible” yet not in the most integrated and efficient way.
You can learn more at virtualbox.com and download it from Software Center of your Linux Distro or download installer from official wiki.
2. Best Performance: Wine (and Proton)
Wine, as in Wine Is Not Emulator, is in my opinion best way to run games and other graphics demanding applications. It might not be as compatible but it’s list is huge and it’s derivative Proton enables users to do one-click setups of games in Steam. It’s the most technologically impressive of the three, yet not the easiest to tweak and trickle for your average Joe.
Fortunately launchers like Lutris are automating that task for you providing options for not only Steam games but also Epic launcher and GOG.
You can learn more at lutris.net and download it from Software Center of your Linux Distro or download installer from official website.
3. A Promising Start — Winapps
Winapps is couple of months old project. It was a bit hard to setup but it amazed me with it’s capabilities. Not in terms of performance nor polished experience but in terms of getting compatibility of VMs and sticking it into your Desktop Environment. After some bugs are polished out you would barely notice a difference between app running natively and app running with Winapps.
You can check out project’s GitHub repository to learn more.
These are not all the ways to run windows software on Linux based operating systems, but pieces of software available for most common computer configurations.
There’s a way to run games in a VM with GPU pass-through (this topic has been explored in depth by Level1Techs) but it isn’t supported on the majority of laptops and requires a whole lot of knowledge to setup, so it isn’t covered here.
These “compatibility layers” can be considered unnecessary by some but I’d argue they’re essential to bringing massive general not tech-savvy user-base, solving chicken and egg problem with software — if you can’t get developers of popular software to support Linux so people can migrate easily, create that support yourself!
