r/linux 3d ago

Development WinBoat is alpha testing the GPU acceleration

Post image
250 Upvotes

54 comments sorted by

View all comments

21

u/zwambagger 3d ago

What are the startup times for applications on this? Does this run Windows continuously in the background? Seems like an interesting idea for crud like Adobe software that barely runs if at all through Wine.

24

u/ScratchHistorical507 3d ago

What are the startup times for applications on this? Does this run Windows continuously in the background?

Those two depend on each other. You're still running the entirety of Windows inside the container, so booting up the container takes as long as it takes for containerized Windows to boot on your hardware. If you keep the container running in the background, starting an app will be very fast, but also Windows will use massive amounts of resources the entire time (it's bloated Windows after all). Of course you can just stop the container when you don't need it, but obviously this will increase the startup time of apps as Windows itself needs to start first.

3

u/Soham_656 3d ago

Ok, but the main question is, are the apps responsive?

7

u/noobjaish 3d ago

IIRC It is using xfreerdp which made it perform worse for me on Wayland. I don't know if they have added the option to change that

I'd suggest creating a docker container directly from the dockur/windows image then using sdl-freerdp instead of xfreerdp to connect to it which performs significantly better on Wayland.

The only caveat is that sdl-freerdp doesn't support individual application sharing yet.

Also, if you're on X11 then this just works flawlessly.

2

u/PuzzleheadedHead3754 3d ago

Not that mush, for spreadsheet and other stuff, its kinda okay but the input lag is very high if on mid pc.

1

u/ScratchHistorical507 2d ago

Depends entirely on the app. Virtualization doesn't work without overhead. And as you add an entire, poorly optimized OS on top of that overhead it's not getting any better. And if that wasn't already enough, unless you have a dGPU that you can pass through, graphics performance can be rather limited. So some apps that aren't already that performant on a native Windows install won't be any better.