In my persistence to fit Linux in my life, I’m curious if some “must have” Windows software will work better if I just ran a Windows VM within Linux.
None of the software I need to work is needed to work continuously. They are basically programs that I fire up when needed, for a few minutes, then exited.
Wine will install them, but not run them, so I’m hoping a VM is the answer as I’m not interested in dual-booting to run a few Windows programs occasionally.
Yeah, sometimes there just isn’t another option. I have a 60GiB Win11 VM for things I use every few months for a couple of minutes at a time
I’d recommend https://www.qemu.org/ for virtualisation
https://virt-manager.org/ for a gui to manage VMs, you can easily add or remove cores, memory, internet, directories etc really easily.
https://github.com/winfsp/winfsp lets you add a directory from your host to the VM to easily share files
https://github.com/virtio-win/virtio-win-guest-tools-installer makes the cursor seamlessly move between the VM and host instead of pressing ctrl alt g to escape.
Win11 23H2 still allows for offline set up. Just press shift f10 when you’re at the internet set up and type
The VM will reboot and give you the option to select I don’t have internet so you can just use a local account
https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat/ for getting rid of the unwanted bloatware
Theres also an easy way to activate windows for free, I don’t think I can link it here but its on github and MAS-sive amount of people have starred it.