Linux Survival Guide #2: Running Windows Applications

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining explainingcomputers.com this time it's the second episode in our linux survival guide in which we're going to be looking at ways you can run at least some windows applications when you've installed linux various options are available and here i'm going to be weighing the pros and the cons of using a linux version of a windows application running wine and related compatibility layer software installing a virtual machine setting up a dual boot and accessing a cloud windows pc so let's go and get started right just before we look at technical solutions it's worth noting that whilst most windows applications are not available for linux some of them actually are so for example if you're used to working in libra office and firefox these are both available for linux and even come pre-installed in many distros for example here in linux mint we can launch libreoffice writer as part of libreoffice there we are and we can also roll up the firefox web browser which is also pre-installed other popular applications with both windows and linux versions include audacity chrome davinci resolve the thunderbird email client and the vlc media player and if you're a windows user who doesn't run any of these programs but you're thinking of migrating to linux then one way of making your journey easier is to try some of these applications in windows before you make the linux leap in terms of pros and cons using a linux version of a windows program is clearly the best possible solution but sadly most windows software is not available for linux which is why things are about to get a bit more complicated one way to run some windows programs in linux is to use wine which has its website here at winehq.org as this notes wine is not a windows emulator indeed the acronym originally stood for wine is not an emulator rather wine is a compatibility layer that allows windows executable files to run by translating calls to the windows operating system into calls to the linux operating system in some linux distros for example zorin os wine is preinstalled but here i'm running linux mint and while it's not pre-installed here so we've got to add it to the system and we could do this using the graphical installer the software manager which i've got running over here where i've done a search for wine and it's come up as you can see but i would suggest you don't install wine using the graphical installer in your system because you often don't get the latest version here for example we get version 5.0 whereas if we look on the website here you'll see the latest version is actually version six so for the best wine experience your best to install from the website so i'll just take my scaling back down a bit so i can bring the download link back up over there and we'll click on download and you'll actually discover it's a set of instructions you get here so if we go down here you'll see we have to pick our distro and because i'm in linux mint it's based on ubuntu therefore i click on ubuntu and then on the next page there's a set of instructions which need to be entered into the terminal and this is a bit daunting i know but basically you need to take each relevant instruction so the first one is that one there and i'll copy that i can also control c to copy i'll run up a terminal and i'll paste each command in turn into the terminal paste like that and enter after the first one i have to enter my password and i'll now go back to the website and continue to enter all the relevant commands and when we get to the final stage you see we can pick which one to install i would suggest going for the stable branch you've probably done that anyway and there we are the process has completed so i'll close down the terminal and we should now have wine on this system it's worth noting that wine does not work with all windows software and if we look on the website here you will see there is an application database up here and if we click on that we can search to find out which software is supported on wide and to what level if we scroll down here we'll also see a list of platidum apps and a top 10 platinum top 10 gold etc and one of the things that's very obvious here is that the vast majority of programs here are older games we've also got microsoft.net framework there we've got a microsoft office 2010 and at least in my experience it's the case that wine generally works best with older software anyway to give you a little demonstration now we've got it installed let's open up the file manager here and go to downloads because in downloads i've got this which is the install file for autodesk's mesh mixer which is a nice little tool for working with 3d meshes cleaning things up for 3d printing things like that and this is of course a windows executable we couldn't use it in linux but if i right click here because we've got wire installed we can open with the wine windows program loader so we'll do that and while it'll come up like that great to see it and now it's installed and we'll just follow through this process and there are clearly some bits of wine to add we haven't yet got on the system so it'll do that because it's the first time we've used it and here we are now running the installer for meshmixer so i'll fold this through there we are and meshmixer is now installed on this system and you'll see there's a couple of icons with added to the desktop one is an lnk file this is a windows shortcut file which we can get rid of just delete that but if we now click on mesh mixer here it should run up hopefully in linux there we are and we'll just bring in the sample bunny by way of example there we are we've got our sample bunny that's nice isn't it and we'll do something simple maybe we'll go to sculpt and we'll just give the the bunny a longer nose there we are we've got the windows program mesh mixer running here in linux now whilst here meshmixer has worked straight out of the box installing and configuring windows software using wine can be a complex and frustrating experience however fortunately there are many programs available to lend a hand for start here on the website for crossover which is a commercial application based on wine which makes it far easier to get many windows programs up and running there's also a free package manager available from github over here which is called wine tricks which again helps you to install windows applications using wine and there's also a graphical front end to wine called play on linux and here i've actually got this running if we go down there you'll see i've just brought up its installer and all sorts of applications are listed other multimedia graphics etc so you can basically pick what you want and then from this just click on it to do an install and i found earlier 3d train studio which sounded very exciting so i've actually installed the train studio so if we just bring that one up by running it you will see that very quickly things get very exciting indeed and in fact we can make them even more exciting if we go up here to view and to cameras and we do the cockpit camera and whoa isn't this exciting running 3d train studio a windows program running in linux using wine and installed via play on linux as another alternative for gamers we also have lutris which you can find on its website here and this is a gaming client for linux which uses wine as what it calls one of its runners for installing and playing windows games finally for gamers valve have created a modified version of wine called proton which is specifically designed for running windows games via steam on linux as well as on its steam deck handheld console to find out which games are compatible you can come over to this website protondb.com and as you can see lots of games have been reported lots of games are here you might find it's very exciting indeed to check this out if you're a gamer and you wish to move to linux now as you've probably gathered there's a lot going on with wide and related programs that provide a compatibility layer between a windows application and a linux distro on the positive side such software allows compatible windows applications to work directly in linux with access to all available hardware resources however many applications do not work or do not work well so with the possible exception of gaming in most cases i personally recommend other solutions another way for linux users to run windows software is to use a virtual machine this requires the installation of virtualization software such as vmware or oracle's vm virtual box which i've got installed here in linux mint and this allows you to run windows as a guest operating system inside a host linux distro here as you can probably see i've got two windows virtual machines set up so let's launch that one which is a windows 10. there we are i'll just log in and this is a virtual machine i set up a while ago so i could do a video where i looked at classic software like netscape navigator and run it safely without running it in a live version of windows but you could install any windows program in a virtual machine or just about any windows program the only programs you're going to have problems with are things like games or video editors that require direct access to a graphics card although this may be achieved using a function called passthrough if you have appropriate virtualization software and supported hardware and just to be clear we'll show you we're still running linux here over there we've got two operating systems running side by side here is lindex under here is windows but for now we'll close down windows 10 and oh look it wants to update itself as it shuts down it must be windows 10 but it's got there so let's now also show you my virtual windows xp and this is a machine i've copied across from my daily driver and the reason i have this machine is so that when i'm working in linux i can go into nice versions of word or if i want to also into say a powerpoint and excel that's good old powerpoint and let's have excel as well i'm sure you've seen them before i always like to see them come up and i like these versions of microsoft office programs because they're the ones which were pre-ribbon so i find these very nice to use so this is a virtual machine i use a lot admittedly on another physical machine and i use it offline of course because it's running windows xp anyway let's shut it down to get back to the oracle virtualbox manager and if you're wondering setting all of this up involves quite a few steps and last year i made a video all about how to get all of this working where i detailed the process of installing virtualbox installing the oracle extension pack to increase its functionality enabling hardware virtualization in your pc's bios installing a guest windows operating system adding what are called virtualbox guest additions to windows to again improve functionality and finally setting things up to allow file and clipboard sharing as well as usb support now clearly there's no point in me reproducing my previous 21 minute video in this one but i thought it'd be nice to quickly go through the process of adding a windows 11 virtual machine to those i already have here note that to do this you'll need to be running virtualbox 6.1.28 or later as windows 11 support was only added in this version and to do this i recommend installing virtualbox viva link on its website which happens to be just there these are the various linux distros we can install for here we would pick the ubuntu link because we're running linux mint and if we simply on that said okay we get a request like this to install the package obviously i can't do that because it's already installed i don't want to reinstall but that's how you install the latest version of virtualbox in linux so let's add a new virtual machine to this system where we can install windows 11 to this system so i'll click on new as you would probably guess and we'll call it windows 11 it automatically picks up that's what we want to do down here you'll see we'll go to next and now we need to allocate an amount of memory to the virtual machine this is a 16 gigabyte computer on now i'm going to give about half of that memory to the virtual machine this is memory the virtual machine will take when we run it up it'll give it back again when it's not running but we inevitably have to split resources between the virtual machine the guest operating system and the host operating system when we're going to be running two operating systems at the same time next we have to set up a virtual drive i'll just take the defaults here this is nice and straightforward and it wants 80 gigabytes it'll only use the space it needs as it needs it if you see what i mean given how this is set up so we'll click on create there and there we are we've got our new windows 11 virtual machine just going to click on settings and then go to system like that where you'll see we've already allocated half the memory to the virtual machine when it's running but i'm also going to allocate half of the processor cores it says there's eight cpus here that's actually eight threads on a quad core system but we'll give half to the virtual machine and click ok next we'll run up a virtual machine like that and because it's a new machine that hasn't run before it asks us for a startup disk so we'll go over here and we need to find it a startup disk and you'll see there i've got the iso for windows 11 and that's there because i went to add and i went to where it downloads here where i've already downloaded that iso i'll just show you that so you're clear where that's come from and of course i downloaded that from the microsoft website so we'll choose that and then we'll go to start and we're now in the windows 11 installer where i'll set my language and we can click on install now and i don't have a product key so we'll just say that down there and i want to install windows 11 pro and i also want to make sure we're offline when we do this so i can set up a local account and to do that i'm going to go down here to virtualbox and i'm going to disconnect the network adapter now when we've done that we'll get to this message because our virtual machine doesn't meet the requirements for windows 11 but we can fix this by going backwards and then pressing shift f10 so we can run reg edit the registry editor and i'm going to apply the same hack i showed in my windows 11 video where we want to go down to h key local machine and then system and then setup where we want to create a new key like that which we're going to call lab config next inside labconfig we're going to add a new dword 32-bit value like that which we're going to call bypass tpm check and then we're going to set the value of that key to 1. next we're going to add down here another one of those in another d word value this time to be called bypass secure boot check and you can see if i just expand it out that's what we've done and again we'll set the value to one and then we now close down the registry editor we are exit from this like that and then proceed through the installer and here we now are running windows 11 in a virtual machine in linux mint and at this point we could go on to do more configuration adding guest additions in virtualbox to improve functionality adding file sharing between the operating systems things like that all of which i cover in detail in the other video i mentioned earlier but for now i would conclude this section by noting that the big benefit of using a virtual machine is that almost all windows applications can work subject only to the constraints of direct hardware access however on the negative side not all of a computer's cpu cores ram and other resources can ever be available to a virtual machine because as we saw during setup a virtual machine can only ever be allocated a proportion of the available physical hardware a fourth solution for accessing windows applications is to run linux and windows on the same hardware but not at the same time this may be achieved in one of two basic ways the first of which is to set up a dual boot by installing linux and windows on the same system drive with a boot menu called grub but allows you to select between them when you turn on the computer most linux distros provide this option during installation and i've covered the setup process in depth in my video ryzen budget pc build number 4 linux mint dual boot the main benefit of a single drive dual boot is that both operating systems have access to wall hardware so there are no constraints on the applications that windows can run however you can't work with linux and windows software at the same time even more fundamentally it's not that uncommon for a single drive dual boot to become corrupted so preventing access to both windows and linux because of this these days i usually recommend a virtual machine over a single drive dual boot for non-technical users who rely on their computer to remain fully operational the alternative to a single drive dual boot is to have linux and windows installed on two separate drives these may be physically switched in and out using removable bays or selected on boot using a pc's bios menu as i demonstrated in my video ubuntu 20.04 for windows users it's also possible to install linux on an external drive that's plugged in as required and again selected via a computer's bios boot menu to avoid the chances of a grub bootloader becoming corrupted once again the benefits are that both operating systems have access to all hardware with no application constraints however modern uefi bioses sometimes do not take kindly to regular operating system drive changes so a risk of corruption still remains so be warned that any kind of dual boot can have its problems which is why in recent years i've become such a big fan of virtual machines right just before we bring things to a close i thought i'd point out that a final way to use windows software if you run linux is by accessing windows online several companies now offer cloud windows desktops not least including microsoft itself with windows 365 which i covered in detail in a video a few months ago here in zorin os as in any other linux distro all we need to do is to go to a web browser and go to the page windows365.microsoft.com where i've got an appropriate account and i've got a cloud pc a windows 365 pc all ready to go so we'll open it in the browser like that will allow it access to various things on this physical hardware and then we'll now have to put in a password there we go and once we're through that process we'll find ourselves running a fully functional version of windows in a browser here in zorin os here we can install and run most windows applications with the only things you can't install being programs that require a separate graphics card like most games and high-end video editors but other than that this is a fully functional windows pc that you can access inside linux in terms of pros and cons on the positive side using cloud windows allows you to run all windows applications except those that require a graphics card or other dedicated hardware but the downside is that windows 365 and similar services are expensive with significant subscription charges without doubt windows is the best operating system for running windows applications so if you only or mainly want to run windows applications you should stick with windows as your operating system however many people do want to make the transition from windows to linux and in that context it's often the case you need to retain access to at least some of your windows software and i hope that this video has given you useful information about the options that are available in future episodes of the linux survival guide i'm going to be looking at things like networking printing and security although i've not decided the order of things yet so if you've got particular preferences about what should appear in the next episode of this series do let me know down in the comments section but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you've seen here please press that like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and i hope to talk to you again very soon [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 79,813

Rating: 4.9701443 out of 5

Keywords: Windows in Linux, Running Windows Apps in Linux, Installing Windows applications in Linux, Dual boot, Dual boot Linux and Windows, Dual book Windows and Linux, Linux dual boot, Windows dual boot, WINE, Linux WINE, Lutris, PlayOnLinux, Proton, Steam Proton, Proton Linux, Winetricks, Oracle VM, Oracle VM VirtualBox, VirtualBox, Oracle VirtualBox, VirtualBox Windows 11, Windows 11 VirtualBox, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt

Id: ifUJt1tqP_Q

Length: 23min 6sec (1386 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 07 2021