WinApps is now available and allows you to run Windows applications on Linux

In the month of opening Hayden barnes (an application developer and gWSL Engineering Manager, Windows Subsystem for Linux at Canonical) shared with the Linux community through a Tweet, about the work in which he was dedicating his time "WinApps".

In the shared tweet we could see a small video fragment in which it was shown how "almost natively" you could run Microsoft Office applications on your Ubuntu desktop.

As it was shown appeared to be native Windows apps in a container or VM within Ubuntu. However, no details emerged on how it was achieved I'm only doubts remained for several months, as Hayden Barnes mentioned that he would not share the work to the public until he considered some stability.

Word on Ubuntu 20.04. Very usable on an i5-6300U with just integrated graphics. It is not WINE, remote / cloud, or GNOME on WSL. It is something else I put together. Next, I plan to add working file associations. pic.twitter.com/nGQ8USeR0m

- Hayden Barnes (@unixterminal) April 30, 2020

Rather than wait for this to happen, WinApps was created as a simple form of a command to include applications that run inside a virtual machine (or on any RDP server) directly into GNOME as if they were native applications. 

Now, months after the announcement, it was finally unveiled to the public. both the project and the source code which is available on GitHub, as well as the instructions to implement WinApps in our system.

As such, it is worth mentioning that WinApps was barely released and the stability of the project is not good yet, besides that it is the beginning of what can be a great development, besides that is still considered a personal project of Curtis, it can be seen as a competitor to other tools that already allow running Windows applications on Linux, such as Wine. 

In addition, It should be taken into account that WinApps works at all times under a VM with Windows 10, so the project is totally different than what would be expected (since many would think that it would work like Wine).

In the repository it is explained that WinApps works as follows:

WinApps works by:

Running a Windows RDP Server in a VM Container in the Background
Checking the RDP server for installed applications such as Microsoft Office
If those programs are installed, create shortcuts that take advantage of FreeRDP for both the CLI and the GNOME tray
The files in your home directory can be accessed through the \\tsclient\homemounting inside the VM
You can also right-click any file in your home directory to open it with an application

At the moment the list of applications that are already compatible are the following:

Below is community driven and therefore the WinApps team may not have tested many apps.

Currently supported applications

• Internet Explorer 11 (just because)
• Microsoft Access (2016)
• Microsoft Access (2019)
• Microsoft Access (Office 365)
• MS Excel (2016)
• MS Excel (2019)
• Microsoft Excel (Office 365)
• Microsoft Word (2016)
• Microsoft Word (2019)
• Microsoft Word (Office 365)
• Microsoft OneNote (2016)
• Microsoft OneNote (2019)
• Microsoft OneNote (Office 365)
• Microsoft Outlook (2016)
• Microsoft Outlook (2019)
• Microsoft Outlook (Office 365)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (2016)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (2019)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (Office 365)
• Microsoft Publisher (2016)
• Microsoft Publisher (2019)
• Microsoft Editor (Office 365)

As such, working under a VM may have discouraged many, as it is basically easier to work under a Windows installation in a virtual machine.

But the interesting thing about the project is that WinApps limits itself to working only with key elements and leaves out many services and applications that would consume much more memory on the computer. Although as such, the project is worth testing and monitoring.

How to install WinApps on Linux?

Finally, for those interested in being able to try the project on your system, you can implement WinApps on your system by following the instructions detailed in the repository, which you can access from the link below.

In the TYou can also find documentation about the project, as como también information on how to test new applications and in it, you can also contribute information about the applications that you have tried and are not on the list.