It’s been a while since I switched the final Windows based machine to Linux at my place. Admittedly there are a few things I still need Windows for but those can comfortably run in a Virtual machine on a Linux host or by using Wine, the Windows Emulation Layer for Linux. But time has come to go a step further once again.
When I first switched to Linux I used Wine to run a Windows backup program for which I hadn’t found a replacement at the time. Then I started using Lucky Backup which, despite it’s somewhat ambiguous name considering its purpose, is a rock solid backup program based on rsync that has helped me out many times over the years. The only reason thus for running Wine in the past years was to have easy access to Microsoft’s office programs running directly on Linux instead of in a virtual machine. But my copy of MS office has grown quite antiquated over the years and obviously I’m not buying a new one. Also, LibreOffice has had many improvements for cross document exchange over the years. Hence I find myself using Wine less and less to run MS’es office suite, perhaps once or twice a month for those really difficult compatibility cases. Also I’ve become a bit concerned that Wine could be used by malicious programs caught via email or web exploit and undermine my security. Both things have now prompted me to finally say “bye bye” to Wine and only use MS’es office suite in a virtual machine in case it is absolutely unavoidable.
One thing that i learnt pretty fast after switching to linux on my main laptop for daily usage was: go native.
There is no fun in using windows applications with wine. For 99.9%of the cases theres a good native linux application. Programs run in wine usually have infuntionailities or look ugly as f.
Apparently a win7 Vbox is very storage space hungry. Your VDI will grow pretty fast pretty big.
But i’m optimistic that one day wwe’ll not need it anymore….