I have just discovered Winapps. It is kind of similar to WINE but seems to allow a more natural integration of Microsoft Office with the Desktop Environment. It uses a VM in the background and RDP for communicating with the VM. It seems that RDP allows to use Microsoft Word seamlessly, “like a native application”. The developer has managed to connect the windows VM to a file manager (nautilus) and he shares a directory between the VM and the host OS.
Winapps works on Ubuntu/Fedora and GNOME/KDE.
I just wanted to know if someone here has thought of packaging Winapps or similar technologies. Maybe this technological stack (VM+RDP) would ease using windows applications that aren’t supported well on WINE.
Hmm, this is something I would be interested in for migrating my parent’s computer to NixOS. I will try to look at packaging it when I have some time but at the meanwhile, I would suggest opening an issue in nixpkgs to reduce the chance of multiple people working on it at the same time.
Hmm, this is something I would be interested in for migrating my parent’s computer to NixOS. I will try to look at packaging it when I have some time but at the meanwhile, I would suggest opening an issue in nixpkgs to reduce the chance of multiple people working on it at the same time.
I guess scope needs some careful definition here? Like activation of Windows inside that VM is probably done by user; is automation of Windows installation in scope?
Of course, I would want as much as possible to be declarative. Likely using M-Labs/wfvm: WinF*VM - wfvm - M-Labs Git to build the Windows VM and install applications. Then we would only need to change winnaps to start the VM when not running (can we do a systemd service with freerdp socket activation? check infinisil’s socket-activated minecraft server), fix paths and generate desktop files from declarative config.
Seeing this pop up again and just wanted to mention that we have packages available both for flake and non-flake users (via flake-compat). See the readme.
As for a NixOS module and getting this into Nixpkgs, that’s planned but not really a priority. Contributions are welcome. We’re still working on a rewrite since the current codebase is kind of a mess.