What all of them avoid mentioning is that the images were intended by Microsoft for test and development purposes on Windows and the license clearly states you need a valid Windows license to use them: https://hub.docker.com/r/microsoft/windows#license
I wonder if Microsoft will take some action to enforce this if these projects become popular.
Edit: This comment is incorrect, see below comment from doctorpangloss
That could have changed by now.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscont...
it works by using dockurr, which is a great project but a worse way to distribute windows in the sense that it gets installed instead of downloaded and executed
podman run mcr.microsoft.com/windows:ltsc2019
Trying to pull mcr.microsoft.com/windows:ltsc2019...
Error: choosing an image from manifest list docker://mcr.microsoft.com/windows:ltsc2019: no image found in manifest list for architecture amd64, variant "", OS linux
It’s been 4 years since I even took a good look at it.
Games (if they don't use kernel level anti cheat systems) are all flawless with Proton.
But, I honestly don't have a need to use much other windows only software. Almost everything I need to use has Linux versions, or alternatives that fit my needs.
I haven't used Wine directly in years, only indirectly through Steam.
I'm kind of surprised you can "run Windows" in a Docker container at all. Isn't the fundamental restriction of Docker that all containers share the same (linux) kernel? Is there a way for docker to inject a "translation layer" somehow that makes it look like an NT kernel for the Windows processes?
Looks pretty cool. I remember playing with something similar in Virtualbox, it had a seamless mode too. It was a bit janky, and I think they removed it recently.
I used it in the old days, to have MSN messenger on Ubuntu :)
This is incidentally how Windows 386-9x ran DOS applications - in a VM, using V86 mode.
Oh that is cool! Somehow I imagined that virtualization is more of a "modern" concept, but clearly that is naive thinking.
A form of virtualization was first demonstrated with IBM's CP-40 research system in 1967, then distributed via open source in CP/CMS in 1967–1972, and re-implemented in IBM's VM family from 1972 to the present. Each CP/CMS user was provided a simulated, stand-alone computer.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualization
Sometimes it feels like we don't have any actual innovation in CS anymore and it's all from pre 2000s and only made mainstream starting then.
I now use a dedicated windows laptop in RDP and it is such a better experience better than a VM.
You absolutely need to pass through a GPU so that DWM.exe is properly accelerated; otherwise, it falls back to the software-accelerated WARP and the performance tanks to ~15 FPS.
It doesn't need to be anything powerful; if you have an idle integrated card that you aren't using on the Linux host because you only interact with it through a Web server or SSH (for instance, Proxmox), then pass that through. It's what I do on my home lab which runs a 9950X.
Before people raise pitchforks against Linux, this applies there, too, for the record: at work I have a Linux instance just to myself that by any other metric is ridiculously powerful: 64-core Epyc, 96 GB memory, but no iGPU, so remote desktop works very poorly.
You can't re-create an icon to circumvent trademark law.
Using icon to refer to an application is fair use.
I am not sure what's the point of having a public domain icon.
Even more humorous is the fact they decided to repeat this blunder under every single icon instead of neatly below the table.
This popped into my head before I had a second to do a double take.
MS Office and most popular multiplayer games are the 2 biggest hurdles for Linux adoption at the moment.
This is the last holdout to get my children on Linux.
Have this problem with my brother and nephew, would love to get the lad on Linux, but this is a real obstacle.
at some point in the future, Your OS wouldnt matters because all OS is reaching feature parity
I've been meaning to try WinBoat, but it's based on the same underlying technology (docker+RDP) so I'm guessing I'll hit the same bugs. I was thinking maybe i could alter the code to launch a different RDP client instead of the default.
Still, if you just need Office, it's a much more integrated setup than you can easily achieve with VMs.