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.

  • Showroom7561@lemmy.caOP
    6·
    2 months ago

    Can you share the software you went to use? Maybe there’s a good Linux alternative or someone knows how to get it working in wine.

    These are all paid programs that don’t have viable alternatives and/or I actually need to use them.

    A few off the top of my head:

    • Excire Foto
    • Jpegmini Pro
    • Garmin Basecamp
    • Garmin Express
    • several paid video editing/photo editing apps; I’ve tried alternatives, but they aren’t nearly as intuitive.
    • Reolink camera software.
    • ACP Ups software.

    I do my best to find alternatives to other software, and prefer to use self-hosted solutions, but the ones above aren’t really easy to replace, so I’d rather just run them in a VM.

    I’ve use VMs in windows to run Linux, so I’m aware of the performance hit and possible startup times (but I use snapshots for quick access). I’m not too concerned about that for any of these programs, since I’m only using them from time-to-time.