"Seamless Mode" Microsoft Office in Linux via Windows VM on Threadripper Pro
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- Опубліковано 5 лип 2024
- Table of Contents:
If you just need the guide, it's linked below and step by step. This app is about the "how we got here" and "why its weird" -- also covers why VirtualBox and VMware Workstation don't work for this use case :(
0:40 What do we mean by "Seamless Mode"
1:20 Everyone needs Accelerated GPU sharing for Computer Hygene
1:58 This is different than VFIO which we've shown in the past, but there are bugs
2:32 -- that time stamp is 15:09, you're welcome :D
3:02 Why we need a usable industry-wide standard for sharing one GPU among multiple apps/OS
4:15 Steam support on native linux
5:39 Even though we have Proton, Crossover, Wine... Microsoft Office Still Sucks on "native" Linux and MS keeps breaking it
6:15 Virtual Machine is Flawless to run office, but no GPU acceleration (unless you VFIO)
7:25 VDI is this in the enterprise, but it costs way way too much
8:00 VDI more about control than cost savings, but is overdue imho for coming to consumers
9:05 Second GPU/VFIO passthrough -- but it has had landmines historically
9:50 AMD products for GPU sharing is much the same
12:30 Nvidia API can capture individual windows, including games, to seamlessly pass through but the API is not open on non-quadro cards
14:30 Qubes -- Similar Philosophy, but can't be used because the security of VDI or GPU sharing is not good enough or their project goals.
14:22 RemoteApp: Cornerstone of Seamless Mode
15:00 How Seamless works -- Remote App Setup
16:07 Run Explorer as your remote app (to launch more apps) - Kim Knights Registry Helper Thinige
16:55 WinApps as alternative to KimKnights Registry Helper Thingie
17:30 XfreeRDP -- there are bugs
19:20 More about the Guide for this Linked Below
+ Detailed Guide on The Level1Forum: forum.level1techs.com/t/how-t...
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Intro and Outro Music By: Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
creativecommons.org/licenses/b... - Наука та технологія
Wendel, I appreciate you and what you do for the community.
100% Came here to say this.
FINALLY! Using reason for the old Linux vs Windows discussion. I couldn't care lessmabout what OS or chip my computer uses as long as runs mynapps like Quicken, TurboTax, MS Office 365, ON1 or Lightroom..., and all I get relatively good support. Sandboxing should not be a dream reserved to corporations. Great points made on VDI. Thank you for this great video.
For consumers virtualization is one of the most underused features of modern CPUs. Part of that is presentation. Virtualization is that stuff that geeks do.
Also check out Qubes OS!
Thank you Wendell for having a 5 month old video for my current home-lab headaches!
I'm thankful for what you've been doing. I had a hard time keeping up with half of what you were saying. In the end, I just concluded that it will just be easier to do the standard virt-manager and pass through a second GPU.
Wendell, I am always happy when you upload on this channel :D
This is truly incredible, the amount of work that has gone into this is incredible! Absolutely beautiful. I wish I could buy a gpu now.
Have you considered using Steam as your server/client? You can add non-stream apps! I send explorer and so forth from my Windows box to My Linux box all the time. As a bonus, it works remotely!
Same with Nvidia GameStream and Moonlight.
Good job with the verbose mode. Pretty sure it will also help with the"CC/translate" for the overseas nerds. I know it helped bring me back up to speed on a more general sense.
Thanks Wendell
The "where" you're looking for is @15:10.
Very informative! Will be watching this one again!
Thank you so much for investing the time to produce these great videos. It would be fantastic if you could also create a more detailed how-to guide.
This kind of setup is exactly why I've been so happy using Qubes OS for the last 3-4 years. It's not perfect (at least, for my use case which isn't 100% security-focused), but it has been an enormous joy to use on the whole. The overwhelming feeling of awe I have by actually being in control of my hardware and how it behaves is difficult to put into words. It's kind of an enlightening experience, if you can put up with the quirks - even if most of the quirks are intentional for security reasons.
I've tried Looking Glass, but it wasn't quite there for me yet unfortunately. I thought it was going to be the holy grail, but the fact that it has to copy the whole framebuffer seems to hold it back in regards to performace. Maybe with improved hardware that's less of an issue (I'm on a 6700K). Qubes' whole desktop + kb/m integration of all the VMs for a truly seamless experience with zero latency is exactly what I want. GPU passthrough works perfectly for gaming on Windows, even though it's not officially supported. Someone even made up an experimental build which has Intel GVT-G working for shared GPU acceleration across VMs. Whether Qubes is the OS to ultimately deliver it on a more mainstream level or not, this kind of setup really has to be the future of computing. Please.
PS. As soon as I heard the words "Remote Desktop" in this video I completely lost interest, sadly. I've tried that workflow too, with both ESXi and Proxmox as the host, but the experience was pretty awful compared to the relative perfection of Looking Glass. I'd be delighted to be proven wrong, but RDP and the like is not something I can see myself wanting to use to interface with my main daily-use home desktop. I did really love Proxmox though, and that's what I had Looking Glass working with, but it seemed like a hassle getting the kb/m to pass through and the overall experience wasn't anywhere near as refined as Qubes.
Also, Looking Glass seems to be Windows only? Or at least, I had no idea how to grab the framebuffer from one Linux VM to display in another...
Thanks for the update Wendell on gpu pass-through pleb technologies. It is a noble goal. I lost patience 2 years ago and am dual booting Win10 and Linux again. When I only have 1 hour of gaming at most per day, I didn't want to spend it wondering if a bug/crash is being caused by something in the gpu-passthrough setup vs the game itself. Keep fighting the good fight 👍
I'm not a gamer, but even if I were, my thought would be if it doesn't run on my platform, I don't need to play it. There are hundreds upon hundreds of other games I could play instead, so one game being stubborn means it gets skipped. For that matter, I consider Roblox's refusal to play under Wine, and to outright crash any VM you try it in, as a *FEATURE* rather than a bug (although my daughter may not think so).
So in theory, I could run seemless apps from my windows admin vm on my linux laptop? I'll have to check this out this friday :)
Yep
@@Level1Linux The ultimate corporate hackintosh. Heh heh.
well, until adobe suite is 'native' on linux.
@@classicmartini i always found it interesting adobe would run on the SGI's computers that were unix/linux based but wouldn't do it outside that environment .
Why not just RDP into the admin vm?
@@KeithPatton that's what I do at the moment, but I use just two programs, outlook and the fat client for our ITSM system. Having them as "native" programs would be nice. But I couldn't get it to work, the latency from the VPN probably doesn't help...
I've been working for the last 2 months in a VM on my server. I love this, because my I can use my computer for gaming, so I can stop what I'm doing and come back at it afterwards without ever closing my programs to spare the RAM.
incredible awesome! all good things for this!
Great video. Thanks for the video :)
love this vid. Classic Wendell brain dump. it's awesome remind me of good old Tek Syndicate days. keep on the good work
Holy crap, you got Microsoft office to function!?!? Amazing!
works great!
MS Office functioning AT ALL, under ANY environment is amazing in itself.
Error 43 was a problem for me too. The weird thing was was that I had GPU passthrough with the exact same machine and lost it when a drive started going bad. I ended up trying with UEFI and it resolved my problems. I had had to read through all my notes twice to realize I was skipping that little detail.... I'm back in business and it's great!
Here too soon for "Heeere"
This sounds extremely interesting, I would've never thought of a VM being able to run applications mimicking a native experience.
Kind of like "Windows XP Mode"
I want to use this to do just paying like 2-300k of bills a year for my company... but... you kinda bring it down to reality. Thanks!
Oh man this is great info... thanks~~
This is actually what I want.
I sympathies with your efforts with Looking Glass and it is essential for graphics intensive Apps. However I use that type of Workflow you describe since 2017/18 without bugs. Nowadays I run my Host Ubuntu 21.04 on OpenZFS 2.0 on a Ryzen 3 2200G. I have the following Virtualbox VMs
- Communication Apps on Xubuntu 20.04
- Banking and PayPal on encrypted Ubuntu Mate 20.04
- Multimedia on Ubuntu Studio 20.04
- Try-outs on Ubuntu 20.04
- Windows 10 Pro, needed to set up Internet Banking and in the past it has been needed to use the Dutch TV Viewer.
All VMs and the Host are closed for inbound traffic, only the communication VM has open ports. By definition I run all VMs with all available 4 cores of the 2200G. Linux is perfectly capable of scheduling host and many guest processes effectively. I do use VBox 3D acceleration everywhere and it works fine for most Apps except commercial games. I even play Linux games like ExtremeTuxRacer in a VM on 1080p and 60Hz.
I also have a Windows NT 4.0 VM with an old version 7 of Microsoft Office for Windows 95, that I used 20-25 years ago for my work. Ideal to look in some old docs. VMs allow you to keep different versions of Office Apps in the right environment, so I have Novell Perfect Office with Wordperfect 6.1 In Windows for Workgroups 3.11 for any Wordperfect documents I might encounter :)
Running VMs on a host with with OpenZFS is like running that VM from RAM disk, since I have a 4GB L1ARC (memory cache), that has a disk IO hit rate of 98%. Note that all storage is lz4 compressed and so is the L1ARC and L2ARC and even the transfers over Ethernet to my backup server are lz4 compressed.
I use XRDP in FreeBSD 13.0 also on OpenZFS 2.0 to control my backup server, a 2003 Pentium 4 HT with 4 leftover HDDs :)
WFW, tuxracer, ubu studio, it would be amazing to see a how to vid
@@charlese2833 I have a video from 2018 that shows the main stuff. It is recorded with my previous desktop running from HDDs, see ua-cam.com/video/gtXtTg3Mdqg/v-deo.html
Using VMs in your workflow, best thing ever. I've even got my Dad using it now just to allow easy backups/restore of his entire OS. Just copy this one virtual drive file to your external drive and your done.
Having huge issues getting any Linux OS running well on my Razer Blade with a doc running all monitors and such. SO many graphics problems.
That's 100% due to Optimus, I've had nothing but problems running Linux on laptops using that.
Thunderbolt/USB-C alternate mode display ports are connected to the iGPU, and if you run the dedicated GPU as your main GPU a dock is no bueno. Unsure if the blade has a dedicated mini displayport jack or something like that but that might be routed directly to the dGPU. If it works without problems then you know for sure it's Optimus fucking you over. There might be fixes though, so google away.
Pop os has quite easy out of the box support for nvidia’s proprietary driver and optimus.
with most channels I listen to I put the playback speed at 1.25 or 1.5, but with Wendell I have to go to normal or less because the information density is that great! Also, acronym density is high.
Digging that background music.
This is awesome. I’ve fully migrated to Linux so I don’t need to virtualize anything Windows-related.
Fun thing is virtualization opens up other OS's software library. e.g. OS/2, Mac, etc.
Thank you for this video
I started using RemoteApp over the last year, and I was surprised how smooth it works. I launch cmd prompt through it, so then do whatever I need, or launch whatever I need. It feels much snappier than if I would have launched RDP session, I’m assuming because of bandwidth saved. One by-design type quirk I noticed and found interesting, is that subsequent child windows that are launched from the original show as same pid/hWnd (as original). Anyway, very valuable information learned from this video; I’m not sure why this isn’t more widely used.
Nice vid!
thanks Wendell great vid
Mind...... Blown.
Yay for Winamp!
Yay for Audacious!
@@NickNorton Boo!
It Really Whips the Llama's Ass
@@theeiszeitmann928 Sure does!
Yes Linux content!
Wendel,along the line of this video, I think the next release of Qubes OS is adding pass through capability. It’s almost out of release candidate phase. Would be interesting to see you do an updated Qubes video and cover its new features such as pass through.
Great video. I am really excited to get my new server set up and try this stuff out. Can you use something like a K80 for graphics acceleration for your VMs?
WinAmp...I just had to explain to my wife what WinAmp was last week.
SR-IOV for the masses!
Exciting technology 😁 Architecture encapsulation is the basis of excellent computer science
Robust robust robust!
I dont understand it, but it sounds cool.
Love the setup. What monitors are these?
With containers, how about mounting GPU device itself inside container? In Linux everything has to be a file, this is why /dev/ exist. Then you would also need GPU driver inside that container, and I am not sure if you could use it on 2 containers at once... But maybe some software driver at this layer could work as a scheduler?
Well conteiners can easily share the same GPU because they are "simply" isolated processes.
A container share the host kernel. It uses separate libs and programs, but all of them uses the host kernel. This is archived by using primarily namespaces and cgroups (or namepaces and JobObjects for windows).
Traditional Virtual Machines do a lot more, thus making it hard to share hardware and somewhat inefficient if you want 1 VM per app.
One possible "workaround" that I found (or I think is possible) is using 2 real VMs (1 Linux and 1 Win/NT), use hyper-v GPU paravirtualization and each app inside of the VMs are further isolated with DAC, MAC (SELinux, AppArmor) and container technologies.
You can also use some systemd fearures like systemd-nsspawn and some systwmd's access control tech.
Observations, windows containers doesn't support GUI or RDP, even having DirectX support
Might be in the thread already, but can you use built-in GPU in something like ryzen 4750g for the acceleration of the host system, and discrete GPU for passthrough to the guest to solve some of the problems?
if i'm not wrong, it's with the remoteapp feature of rdp that wsl2 is now abable to out put linux app on windows
So if you have a "normal" win installation for odd jobs which need it and then you have to buy another license for vm, container etc..? How does the windows licensing scheme work with these?
Unrelated, but maybe someone can help me answer my curiosity:
At 13:53, isn't it basically RF sniffing? IIRC there was a paper or POC that said that someone can sniff your RAM by just reading it's RF signal that it generated accidentally because they're operating at GHz range. In that case, would it be possible to just use an old school metal case (the one without that epoxy/glass side panel) and just make sure it grounded properly, effectively making a Faraday Cage and protecting you from leaking RF signal strong enough to be sniffed from distance?
Personally, I have pretty high hopes for the Intel Xe stuff, considering they already have GVT-g on their integrated parts. As far as I can tell, GVT-g is currently the only sane way to have accelerated VMs on Laptops. So much so, that I'd probably still go Intel even with how lackluster the performance of their recent mobile offerings are. I just really hope they don't lock it out on their dedicated parts for some more petty market fragmentation shenanigans.
GVT-g are not working on Intel Xe+. Only from 5th to 10th gen Intel CPUs
@@sergeyvinc1595 True. This wasn't known at the time though. Also, Xe is supposed to support SR-IOV instead, but I don't know anything more about that since I don't own any relevant hardware.
I find the easiest way to do this is still Steam link. As long as both your host and vm graphics cards support hardware en/decoding of h264. It's easy to add an arbitrary program (under windows) to your steam library and just launch it using steam (on your Linux host), then that Windows program is also just a single Window on your host.
But most of the times I just launch Looking-Glass and have the full Windows desktop on one of my screens.
Question is this like having an RDS server with a remote apps publisher? If it is, can I set up a server with a GPU, windows 2022, and use a remote app to play games remotely over RDP?
Is there a way to pass through the CPU temp and voltage to a windows VM from a Linux host?
This is necessary because the only GPU will be passed through to the Windows VM.
Could you do a piece about Nvidia's A100/A40 ?
I always wonder if we can simulate a GPU via CUDA or something.
Is there a way to forward Vulkan over X11 like opengl?
Boiler Snake Merch!
This just seems like the way linux should be built, with sandboxing and seamless operation between those sandboxes in mind. It should just work like this out of the box, regardless of distro. Why is it not being baked into the kernel like it is on Android?
The major benefit of sandboxing in Android is that the average user can operate in a more secure way without even knowing that they are doing anything differently.
It's May 2023 and I'm still trying to figure this out. I even started researching using proxmox directly from the host but it seems to be a very complicated buggy process. Qubes is the model I want for my workstation but I am still yet to find a seamless way that makes sense at home.
I think I'll try using this for ARM Keil, that's the only productive thing I'm using windows for recently
Edit: It's amazing, (almost) everything works! Just don't try to click the "minimize window" button :D
Is there a way to get GPU accel in Hyper-V VM on Pro edition (not Server) now?
"One GPU to rule them all"
(Sorry, I'll leave quietly!)
Microsoft was using RemoteApp way back in 2009 with Windows XP "seamless" mode in Windows 7 Pro. I think the holy grail would be what OS/2 did with seamless Win-OS/2 sessions, but that wouldn't fly from a security perspective on a modern system (It used modified Win 3.1x video drivers).
What about intel iGPUs to share with host and guest? I am more about the hardware decoding
I believe chrome os is working on getting a linux vm accelerated by the host’s gpu. So you have the host and guest sharing one gpu. This is supposedly in trying to get steam on chromebooks.
Months ago, I set up a secondary computer to learn Linux on. The end goal is to become fluent enough, to replace Windows with Fedora on my main/gaming rig. SELinux? No sweat. WINE, of all things has become my personal kryptonite, and I cannot seem to master it's inner secrets. I even tried swearing at it, but dnf was like, "I don't know what *"%$^#"* means."
Hypothetically, could this still be done with both the host and guest OS using TeamViewer?
Noob level question(s) here before jumping in. I have to use Office for school and work, what's the best VM for it? And is there a way to disable the keyboard for the host, say like some chain of keys, so I don't accidentally activate it while going Excel ninja?
Any vm should be quite similar. I’d personally recommend either gnome boxes (Wendell uses it in this video) or virt-manager.
Then follow either wendell’s guide on the forum or follow winapps’ setup guide. They are basically ways to achieve the exact same result, which is a Windows vm usable in seamless mode in Linux through freeRDP.
viable to use this to run photoshop and draw on it using a graphics tablet?
instead of explorer.exe have you tried using a third party start menu as a remote app. like start10 or classic shell
Hi Wendell. Thanks for another instersting Video. What woudl be the best Graphics card for Linux (Ubuntu) in order to have three 4k Screens at 60HZ? Essentially I do not want to keep fiddling with Xrander configuration. Is ubuntu capable of detecting 3 4k Screens and set them up as an extended desktop? I would really appreciate your answer as you are the only guy I trust in terms of Linux setup knowledge.
I don’t believe there is any fundamental limitation on how many screens you can run on linux.
There are hardware limitations you need to be wary of however. For 4k 60Hz your HDMI cables and ports must be at least HDMI 2.0 or later. DisplayPort needs DisplayPort 1.2 or later.
Your graphics card also needs the oomph to drive it.
Other than that I’d do some research on people with extreme setups in Linux. As a general tip I’d advise to use wayland as that’s usually way easier than fiddling with xrandr. If you have a nvidia card the 470 drivers will help unlock better nvidia functionality on wayland.
Would that work with iGPU (e.g. 5700G) + desktop GPU (e.g. nvidia) in one box?
This is also something I was thinking about since Windows 11 have strong hardware requierement but the requierement are quite flexible as VM. I was thinking about a way to do it with Azure Virtual Desktop. The sad part is the Azure RDP SDK for Linux is not available to the public to my knowledge. I will defenitly look at your tutorial if I can have a decent experience, this might be a way that will prevent me to e-waste my business laptop and PC.
I might do this to play Wargame Red Dragon
Neat.
I personally have no desire to use Windows or Malwaresoft products, but hey
Neat
virgl could be interesting for this. Allows hardware acceleration in VMs for opengl and also vulkan as of recently. Unfortunately it requires guest drivers, and there is only a proof of concept from years ago for windows. Linux is a different story, but with that you're ignoring the compatibility part and only do it for the security reasons.
Gvt-g (intel only) can also be used for hardware acceleration in VMs. Although I’m not really sure what the differences are between virgl and Gvt-g
Good News ! .... GParted 1.3.0 has just been released. Now available on oios.
Mmm, didn't previous versions of Windows 10 allow more multiple connections?
Threadripper needs vega integrated graphics to not expend a pcie slot with a gpu for the vm hypervisor.
time to make use of GVT-g in my ancient 7600k
With my cheap Gateway Laptop that has an RTX 2060, I supposedly have integrated Intel graphics also. Anyone know if I could assign the RTX2060 to the windows VM and just use the Intel graphics for the linux base OS?
Hardware accelerated terminal? I guess I got to get a quadro for running nano
i have remote app tool i to work great, but the latency is not good to play a game, what tweak it need ?
Some of the bugs of XfreeRDP are fixed in itopia and ThinCast RDP clients which are based on it
Unfortunately the /app parameter to activate remote app mode is not working on the alternate clients but I got around this by creating RDP connection files based on the winapps info files and placing them along them and the icon files and reading their path when reading the icon path to use with the winapps lunch script with alternate clients that work better than the mainline XfreeRDP at this moment
This mixed with AtlasOS that is super lightweight and i think we have a winner..
I have watched this video previous from today. However, one thing I just realized, we had this capability built into IBM OS/2 Warp 3 back in the 90's so........
How about sharing USB devices like a Graphic Tablet, MIDI Keyboard, Pro Sound Interface ...
This sounds a lot like WSLg but backwards, hopefully this works as good as WSLg
Very cool, but honestly , just use groff :P
well, i think i will keep my 2 gpus for passthrough for a while...
I'm really enthusiastic about the topic of running applications that are not meant to be run on Linux. In our school environment, I'm sick of hearing how integrated Apple systems are and how much software runs on Windows. I dislike the fact that pupils are geared towards using Apple or Windows on these grounds.
I'm not sure whether your video was geared towards giving practical guidelines, but I'd very much appreciate you giving more practice examples on what it needs to make such systems work.
In my computer science lessons, I've shown pupils the power of free and open source software and operating systems, and I've even installed many complete coding environments on outdated Windows laptops that are perfectly capable of running (Arch) Linux on them.
Could this be re-visited or viable for APU based devices like the SteamDeck?
It would be nice to be able to play/use Windows Store based games without dual-booting and instead using a vm setup like this.
So, i'll back to my original plan. Get, idk, a window 10 with a few ram consumption as VM using KVM(libvirt) and connect with rdp apps...
i'd absolutely love the ability to do that on linux, but i'm a noob :p but I'll check out the guide. I've tried first steps on my own using virtualbox and an existing windows 10 install from a physical drive (so i can check out windows from a linux host, but also revert easily to a windows machine), but windows 10 freaks out at the detected repetitive "hardware" changes, running disk-check at startup and even temporarily de-activating its license...
We are almost there, true supremacy
what monitor is this one, look gorgeous
Any recommendations to manage lxc/lxd from web gui?
podman on cockpit or possibly portainer depending on how outside the lines you want to color
@@Level1Techs Proxmox perhaps? It can be installed with only a few simple commands on every Linux distribution as long as it is Debian based (as far as I know) and everything can be configured through a neat, state of the art, web based administration console (which includes seamless VNC and SSH clients, among others) 🤓
@@Level1Techs i also find lxdui, lxdmosaic and lxdware were able to manage lxc/lxd
Any update on this months later?
to skip the the "remote app tool" part and be able to open any application as a RemoteApp, a single registry key needs to be set (but won't show in Kimmknight RAWeb obv):
Registry Key: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Terminal Services
Value Name: fAllowUnlistedRemotePrograms
Value Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 1
I have little interest in the video, I don't use Linux and I should. But I haven't heard Wendel voice in such a long time I had to click. Love from Ireland