If you've been following my work as of late, you'll know that I've been an increasingly big fan of Linux as my primary operating system in favor of Windows 11. I love the customization, speed, and the knowledge that I can make the experience my own without constant interruptions from Microsoft.

However, Linux has a big problem: the apps you're familiar with on Windows and macOS may not be available there. A few big apps are missing from Linux, which makes a full transition complicated. Thankfully, solutions like WinApps try to bridge the gap by bringing Windows apps to the Linux desktop through a clever use of virtualization. I've talked about WinApps before, but I wanted to go back in and try some specific apps you might want to run on your Linux PC that only exist for Windows. This is still one of the better solutions to bring Windows apps to Linux, with some caveats. Let's take a look at some of the things I tried.

Microsoft Office

A soft ball

Microsoft Office is one of the most essential sets of apps you'll probably have on a Windows PC, and thankfully, it's also a bit of a soft ball for WinApps. There's nothing overly fancy about the core Microsoft Office apps in terms of rendering. Once you get past the sign-in and activation screen, which I recommend doing in the full Windows desktop, the apps are very easily usable.

There are a ton of features in these apps, of course, so it would be impossible to test them all, but all the basics worked with no issue. I could write in Word and easily change formatting, insert images, and even use WordArt. In PowerPoint, I was able to use Microsoft Designer for design suggestions, and I even added an animation to a slideshow. It played back a bit slowly, but it did work. In Excel, I just quickly loaded a budget template, and that also worked fine with all the formulas required for it to function. OneNote similarly worked without any major issues.

Adobe Photoshop

Nearly unusable

I've mentioned this before when talking about WinApps, but unfortunately, using Adobe Photoshop is nearly impossible when using this tool. See, when you use WinApps, your backend is only using a relatively basic display driver for Windows, and on top of that, connecting to the virtual machine via FreeRDP means you're limited to the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter, which doesn't have a lot of the GPU features programs like Adobe Photoshop rely on. Right off the bat, launching it for the first time, I was shown an error saying my GPU isn't supported.

Despite that, a few features in Photoshop do work. The menu bar at the top mostly works fine, and some of the sidebar tools like cropping and using a brush to draw work fine. But many other tools are a complete disaster. Using the subject selection tool for the first time, a pop-up appears asking if I want to use the cloud or local processing for object detection, but the window that appears is constantly moving to the right of the screen, so you have to catch it before it disappears. Even then, it may sometimes now fully render properly, as seen above, where the buttons to actually choose an option are gone.

Even after that, though, the selection tool is completely broken, and it's almost impossible to get the selection to appear or to take any action on it. Similarly, the adjustments panel doesn't seem to work, at least when attempting to switch to single adjustments. If you need Photoshop, this is a solution that just won't work for you.

On that note, I also attempted to run DaVinci Resolve through WinApps, but the app failed to load altogether due to the GPU not being supported. If you can find a way to assign a discrete GPU to your container, this could be doable, but at that point, you can just use the native Linux version of Resolve.

Adobe Lightroom

Editing photos is possible, but not fast

Aside from Photoshop, Lightroom is another part of Adobe's Creative Cloud that I rely on very frequently. Thankfully, this one fares quite a bit better when used through WinApps. The lack of proper GPU support still means performance won't be great, but if you're mostly doing lighting adjustments and you can do them manually, you don't need a ton of GPU power. The part of Lightroom that's most affected here is the automatic denoise feature, which will take several minutes to render due to the GPU issue.

Aside from that, I actually had a pretty good time using Lightroom this way. All the features I'm most used to seemed to work fine, including changing lighting, color settings, removing chromatic aberration, enabling lens distortion, and even manual noise reduction. Performance is also noticeably slower if you try to remove objects from the image, since that's another GPU-intensive feature, but otherwise, things worked quite well within what you can expect from WinApps. You can even use the "Open With" option in the Linux context menu and choose Lightroom as an option to open image files, as long as the Windows container is running.

Affinity Photo 2

The big Photoshop rival

While there are plenty of Photoshop competitors that run natively on Linux, it wouldn't be unfair to say that they often lack the ease of use and friendly UI that Photoshop provides. So, if Photoshop on Windows is unusable, what are the other options? Well, I decided to try Affinity Photo, a rival to Photoshop that is also paid (but much cheaper) and only available on Linux and macOS.

To my great pleasure, Affinity Photo actually works nearly perfectly through WinApps. I was able to use the app for a wide range of edits, starting with the typical RAW development — changing brightness and contrast, reducing noise, and lens correction. After that, I was also able to perform more Photoshop-like edits, including object selection, which actually works totally fine, unlike in Photoshop. Really, there were no major visual bugs in Affinity Photo during my testing that stopped me from doing my work. The AI-powered object selection took some time to process (likely because of virtualization), but otherwise, things worked quite well.

The only major downside I could spot was that when I created a new layer by copying and pasting, the Affinity Photo window closed on my Linux desktop. This wasn't the app itself crashing, though, it was the WinApps session, so when I relaunched the app from my Linux, everything was exactly as it was before the "crash". Honestly, it was a better experience than I thought it might be.

Opera GX

The gaming browser comes to Linux

The vast majority of popular web browsers are available on Linux with native versions, but one notable exception is Opera's gaming-oriented browser, Opera GX. With features like resource usage management, in-depth theming, and more, it's an interesting browser in its own right, and it's a shame Linux users are left out.

Opera GX's problems start right away with not being detected by WinApps when configuring the app, probably because its executable is stored in the AppData folder rather than the typical Program Files folders for installed apps. That means we have to run it manually using the terminal, but once we do, it works mostly okay aside from the inherent issues with using WinApps, such as the mouse cursor sometimes not aligning properly with the UI. Using the maximize/restore button usually helps with this.

Otherwise, though, things worked fine. Themes were installed and worked fine, and while animations aren't super smooth, even the animated backgrounds were enjoyable to look at. The features for optimizing resource usage may help keep your PC's fan under control a bit, but the overhead of running a full Windows install inside Linux will always be there, so be prepared to hear some noise, particularly on a laptop or mini PC. Don't expect this to be a lightweight browser compared to anything that runs natively on Linux.

WinApps can help, but it's flawed

Based on my experience, WinApps proved to be a solid way to bring certain apps from Windows to Linux, but it's heavily dependent on the apps you need. Something like Photoshop and video editing software is a no-go with this setup due to the GPU restrictions. Besides that, there are also some issues that affect all or most of these apps, like how resizing them can cause things to stutter or become unresponsive. Sometimes, maximizing an app will make it appear over your desktop UI so you can't use the dock or the menu bar at the top. Little things like that make this experience unpleasant too often.

However, once you learn the quirks and prepare for them, it can be a solid way to maintain access to Windows apps you need. If you're using them frequently, it may still be better to try and find alternatives that run natively on Linux, but for occasional use, this is a completely valid option.