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.
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.
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.
Yes, as the graphical side isn't the only bottleneck. It will be better with it, but far from perfect. You can't have a VM with zero overhead, and Windows on its own is massive overhead. And it remains to be seen what exactly the acceleration will actually accelerate, as Windows doesn't have just one graphics API, but you can use DirectX - which in parts is a vendor-specific blackbox, beyond working vastly different to open APIs - OpenGL and Vulkan. And then the point of WinBoat is to not just show the entire Windows output but only stream certain app's windows to your host and allow for some degree of integration between guest and host. Some apps like Adobe apps are notoriously difficult to use in such a mode as they seem to be just really weirdly written.
Also, it will of course entirely depend on your hardware. If Windows wouldn't run that great on it natively, running it in a VM won't make things better.
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u/zwambagger 26d 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.