There are multiple Box+Wine distros floating around at the moment. r/EmulationOnAndroid likes to talk about https://github.com/olegos2/mobox as having the current best performance compared to Winlator.
On that note, termux is really freaking cool. It almost feels like I have Linux on a phone and makes me a bit sad that we have Android instead (yes, yes, I know it's technically based on Linux, but we all know that's not really the same thing).
Termux + nvim has enabled many from underpriviliged backgrounds who cannot afford a computer to get into programming and build a career for themselves.
Used electronics of decent quality is really difficult to come across in third world countries.
There is both a cultural reason and an economic reason, people just keep their stuff longer instead of replacing it when the next generation technology is available.
I helped out at a computer repair shop as a teenager and the stuff people kept asking you repair were in really bad shape.
I imagine it's probably more than just price. A laptop is less portable and requires a backpack to carry it, and requires access to wall sockets to continuously charge it. You may be at greater risk of being robbed, and the people around you may have distrust of such technology or there may be other social factors at play. You also have to have the digital literacy to operate a full blown desktop operating system (may not be as much of a problem for people who figured out Termux, but Android is still much simpler in general).
Plus if someone has an Android device it doesn't mean they were easily able to afford it, it could've been a gift from long ago, or a hand-me-down, or required years of hard work to get, etc
There's no way that guy can't afford $50 for a used laptop.
He doesn't appear to say that he can't either - it's just a screenshot of termux. Guess what? I've also taken screenshots of termux. It's neat. If all you have is your phone or tablet, it works.
On his twitter page the only thing I see is a screenshot of gnome-terminal. So I guess he can indeed afford it.
Also lolled at "Volunteer Software Developer at @osintforukraine"
>Termux + nvim has enabled many from underpriviliged backgrounds who cannot afford a computer to get into programming and build a career for themselves.
Really? Where? AFAIK even in poor countries, outdated old tower PCs over 10-15 years old, can be had for peanuts or even free if you go dumpster diving for parts through the imported e-waste scrap and build one yourself. No need to resort to using your phone as a computer.
> No need to resort to using your phone as a computer.
I think you don't understand what it's like where I come from (India). Everyone has an android phone. Even kids who have never seen a laptop in their lives. If I was one of those kids, it would be quite unimaginable to go out and acquire a computer just to start programming. If I can just get started on my phone the barrier to entry is 10x lower.
My wife is using some custom software to create photo albums, so 99% of tablets don't work for her. With this I'm finally able to give her dream machine: affordable, lightweight and photo making machine.
I’d wonder how this would beat a used surface go or something similar - they’re pretty light and affordable. And, while they’re not powerhouses, I wouldn’t expect much from a budget android tablet emulating x86 and running wine.
You can get pretty powerful, nearly mint condition Surface alternatives from Dell and Lenovo for fraction of the price, if you look at post-lease hardware. My last two portable machines were such 2-in-1 devices - specs comparable to top Surface 2-in-1 line, but for one third of the price.
I would expect most budget Android tablets to provide a significantly more smooth experience than a Surface Go. While it was almost serviceable at launch, these days it can barely keep up with Windows.
Not exactly what you were asking, but winevdm [0] does use code from Wine to run 16-bit Windows applications on 64-bit Windows installs that don't support it natively (via ntvdm).
While the specific names escape me, there have been a few projects over the years that have replaced DirectDraw or Direct X DLL files with re-implemented counterparts that tend to work much better on modern hardware.
I believe in one such case, the original StarCraft would run with really buggy colors using the official Windows DLL files and a drop-in DLL replacement would fix the issue (these days I think Blizzard has shipped their own fix for this issue).
Another would be DXWND which is amazing :)
It has a ton of options that not only fix various issues with old games but you even have additional features like an ability to run games that never had that support in windowed mode.
I've seen a blog post in the past about running it under WSL so it's entirely possible. That said you could probably just side-load Winlator in Windows 11 as well
Wine is part of this project[1] to run 16-bit windows executables on 64-bit windows. But I think I've seen it referred to generally as 'wine for windows'. It's definitely been a target at times, but I can't find it at the moment.
On a similar/tangential note about running stuff on wine, does anyone know how to run Microsoft Office, or Netflix (or any similar DRM service like Prime videos) on Linux using wine?
I’m seriously considering switching to Linux on a new laptop as someone tired of windows eating resources randomly and I don’t want to install Windows 10 when I get my laptop. I’ve looked at hypervisors and have used hyper x but there still appears to be a performance hit even if the host is Linux (if I’m not mistaken).
DRM used to work; I installed Chrome in Lutris and managed to get Amazon Prime working, though Chrome was very buggy. Netflix sort of works in Firefox (needs an addon to play 1080p video, no idea about 4k).
Microsoft Office (at least, a version that's kept up to date) doesn't work in Wine. I find ONLYOFFICE to be a very competent replacement, though.
I've also used Cassowary to configure a Windows 10 VM + Remote Desktop Apps, which allow for Windows programs to appear native in the Linux launcher while secretly launching the VM and starting an RDP session for that application alone. It's a bit fiddly to set up, but it works if you rarely ever use Office.
As a last resort, you could do what Microsoft did with Windows 11 when Wordpad got removed: install Microsoft Office Online as a web application (requires Chromium/WebKit browser to be installed since Mozilla decided PWAs aren't important to desktop users).
If you don't care much about privacy risks, you could also skip the Linux crap and install ChromeOS Flex. It's probably the most user-friendly Linux desktop out there, and DRM should work out of the box.
Or just use reactos' Wordpad. Get their ISO, use 7zip to uncompress it, and search inside for a bigass CAB file which is hundred of MB's in size. Extract that with 7zip again under a "ros" folder and you'll have WordPad.exe, Calc and lots of goodies for free (as in freedom) in your Windows machine.
Yeah at that point just pirate things. Much easier and I don't think even the most moral person could argue against pirating something you can legally access anyway.
Sounds like a job for a bot that follows your Plex / Jellyfin history and clicks play on the original streaming service. You get to avoid whatever terrible UI the media conglomerate shackled their content to, get a persistent copy that works offline, and the creators still get paid. Everybody wins :)
Id recommend just dual booting Linux for a while. I have windows installed on my pc basically for when I need to sign a PDF, but it's handy every once in a while.
I'm one very happy Linux Mint user. It's the best distro by far imo.
Recently I've been using more and more the web versions of Microsoft apps. This made me think that I'll be able to switch back to Linux soon, as now almost everything can be done in the browser.
Feels like swimming against the current tho. Said dev experience poorly emulates actual linux at best.
Also, I’d think twice before running custom windows isos or unvetted scripts.
I've been thinking along similar lines for a while now, among a lot of users there isn't a sense of security 'hygiene' and a lot of trust granted that doesn't have a foundation beyond looking legit (i.e. has a github). The main thing that seems to be stop it happening is a lack of returns compared to going after a corporation or social engineering/phishing to find someone who will give you money. What I do wonder about is supply chain attacks on something used by a lot of smaller projects, which would end up hitting more targets compared to compromising individual small projects.
Be wary, unknown actors are targeting devs. My email that is only exposed in github recieves targeted mails on the regular, maybe randomly or maybe because I released and contributed to several popular code bases.
Dev credentials tend to unlock more doors than hacking a soccer mom.
Older versions of Office can work quite well under Wine. 2007 is quite easy to get going using PlayOnLinux or Crossover for example. Newer versions are more trouble.
Fair warning though, your battery life will be like 1/4 of what it is on Windows, and Linux's memory handling on OOM is much worse than Windows. So saving resources probably isn't the best motivation.
I recently changed my work desktop environment to Linux, however the transition has been a bit rough. The University I work for uses Microsoft OneDrive for file storage and sharing, but won't authorize the 3rd party Linux onedrive app. I want the files locally, so the clunky web interface is a no go. I don't have a spare wINDOWS LICENSE.
There is however an official Android OneDrive app. So I installed an virtual android instance on my Linux workstation and logged in with the Onedrive app...but boom. The Ondrive app will store files locally, but not in the way of the Desktop app. Each file is named something random which is indexed by some database file, and the directory structure is not maintained at all. Making it pretty much unusable without some fix.
Its infuriating. A smart programmer might be able to make an interface that translates their directory system to the real one, but ugh.
AADSTS65002: Consent between first party application 'b26aadf8-566f-4478-926f-589f601d9c74' and first party resource '00000003-0000-0000-c000-000000000000' must be configured via preauthorization - applications owned and operated by Microsoft must get approval from the API owner before requesting tokens for that API.
couldn't you run an absolutely minimal windows install in a virtual machine that boots up in the background and uses limited resources (1 CPU, 1GB RAM) and then use the virtual machine settings to share the OneDrive folder between host and guest?
Try insync (one-time payment), and works like a charm. I've been using it for a couple of years, zero problems. Syncs noy only OneDrive, also Google Drive and others.
This kind of crap is typical for "shadow IT" scenarios... like, email is done by central, but individual departments can run their own IT because central IT doesn't want to be bothered with the kind of demands that the people who want to run desktop Linux tend to have on the regular.
And then, when stuff like OP crops up, they say "good luck, we only approve our system".
Box64 and a bunch of extra settings (DXVK and such). It's a bit buggy in some places, but it works well once you get through the setup process.
This sucks the voltage out of my phone's battery faster than any other app I know, though. On the one hand, I now have a modded Oblivion install on my phone, on the other hand, I can play it for maybe half an hour before I need to look for a charger.
Not drop-in, because Dawn doesn't implement the Direct3D API. You could probably bridge Direct3D to WebGPU by implementing the headers[1] though, which is exactly what DXVK does for Vulkan [2].
Wine does run Windows music software quite well, sometimes even better than Windows; in fact the first and most famous hardware VST host, the Muse Receptor, used Linux + WINE under the hood almost 20 years ago.
Wine on Linux desktop runs an older version of Reason okish, I believe. I never tested that, just read somewhere. But if you wanna run, say, Reason 12, I don't think it works very well.
Sounds very fun (except latency), contrary to my sibling commenters I'd also prefer "big boy" music software (even if very old) to something "made for mobile".
Makes me think this could also be the way to run PureData (the whole thing, not just compiled patches) on Android. Was a bit surprised it never got ported last time I looked.
Would be nice to sketch out small ideas like making patches or beats etc when bored / out and about in places it's not conducive to bring or bust all that stuff out.
What does that do that something like FLStudio mobile doesn't?
I feel like Reason or Live, out of all the available options, would be a worst case. I can barely read the text on Reason VST and Live's UI is very crowded. Unless you're walking around with a 10"+ tablet or something how would that even work?
I've tried to use Wine throughout the decades and still feel delight when and application loads, but I've never once found it usable, due to one glitch or another, with the only exception being a couple video games. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. My recent attempts have been Fusion 360 and the Remarkable 2 app, both executing but so glitchy that it wasn't worth it. I appreciate the effort but it seems like chasing the dragon, at least with desktop apps. It does seem to have gotten a lot of traction with video games though.
800x600, around 20 fps, settings on high.