https://get.activated.win wouldn't be online if microsoft cared.

Most laptops have included Windows 10 or 11 licenses, which are valid for this use

I don't get it. Is it a VM in a container? Skimming https://hub.docker.com/r/microsoft/windows I would have interpreted that as a native Windows container, which I vaguely recall being a thing, but that would require an NT host, not Linux.

no, this system does not work by launching the windows containers on windows mcr.microsoft.com/windows images

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

And unfortunately it has become the norm in open-source to push out shiny-looking projects with pretty logos and UX but shoddy underlying technology and deceptive/overstated claims (looking at you Tauri).

Thing thing uses RDP for communication which was designed for remotely administering servers over low speed networks.

VirtualBox in contrast integrates at the driver level, and allows you to share the underlying GPU buffers, giving you a native experience that works for things like games or heavy apps. It integrates the Linux filesystem on a driver level as well.

Except these seamless modes have been broken for many years. Also using a containerized Windows means one doesn't have to fiddle with the insane Windows 11 setup process and TPM issues.

As someone who is looking to go Linux, do most windows apps work now through Wine or VirtualBox ? I know Valve did a lot of work for games.

It’s been 4 years since I even took a good look at it.

Seamless Mode didn't work for anything newer than... XP, I think, as a guest? So it makes sense they'd drop it. Fun while it lasted though!

They are virtualizing it!

This is incidentally how Windows 386-9x ran DOS applications - in a VM, using V86 mode.

> UI is sluggish

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.

It's pretty good. They use XfreeRDP to remote into the container and display individual windows. This somehow performs a lot better than the GPU emulations of VirtualBox or VMware. I guess Microsoft put some effort into optimizing RDP for Terminal Server applications.

Think of the fact that nobody working on the project even considered that as a helpful warning to not use it.

Even more humorous is the fact they decided to repeat this blunder under every single icon instead of neatly below the table.

Who's re-creating an icon? I can only see links to images from Wikipedia

I'm using MS Office for Work in the browser. But I just live with the shortcomings specifically in PowerPoint where I can't do connectors for example.

Works on wine via vulcan/opencl

Probably works the same as any other container that needs such acceleration (plex, CUDA) just pass the device over and the CAPs. There are guides online. Whether or not the windows in a container will use it idk.

What is missing from the unofficial Bedrock launcher?

https://minecraft-linux.github.io/

What's missing from the launcher available on Linux? I've been using it for many years, but I have never used in on Windows.

Hah! Even better question is can you run it inside WSL?

The OS matters, because if it belongs to a mega-corporation, it serves its goals, not yours. Examples: Windows spying on users, iOS not allowing 3rd-party apps without you providing all your private data to Apple.