fmstrat/winapps

WinApps is a Linux shell tool that lets Windows applications appear and behave as if they are native programs on a Linux desktop. Instead of switching to a Windows virtual machine to use software like Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop, WinApps creates shortcuts in your Linux application menu that open those programs directly inside a running Windows session, displayed in their own window on your Linux desktop. The way it works is that a Windows virtual machine or RDP (remote desktop) server runs in the background. WinApps connects to that server and checks which Windows applications are installed. For each recognized application, it creates a launcher in your Linux desktop environment, such as GNOME or KDE. When you click that launcher, it opens the specific Windows program via a remote desktop connection, sized to fill just that one window rather than showing the full Windows desktop. The integration goes beyond just launching apps. Files in your Linux home folder are made available inside the Windows VM at a shared network path, so you can pass files back and forth. WinApps also hooks into the Linux file manager (Nautilus), so right-clicking on a file of a supported type gives you an option to open it with the corresponding Windows application. Out of the box, WinApps has official support for the Microsoft Office suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and others), the full Adobe Creative Cloud lineup (Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and more), and a few other tools like Visual Studio. Beyond those, it will also detect and create launchers for any other Windows program it finds installed on the virtual machine by scanning the Windows registry. The project launched in 2020 and reached the top post on the r/linux community on its release day.