Hey Home-labbers/ self hosters.
This weekend my 10 year old processing machine finally bit the dust (RIP 🗿 💀 ; old system76 laptop, won’t even post, not the topic of this thread but if you’ve got ideas, I’m all ears), and as part of figuring out what happened and coming to the realization its time for a new machine. And as part of getting/ pricing a new machine (not looking forward to the consequences of the RAM-pocalypse), I’ve been reviewing/ thinking about the “structure” of what we as a household currently use our self-hosted/ home-labbed system for.
Myself and my partner are researchers, and as such, we regularly collaborate/ work together on manuscripts, and the reality is, we rely on windows because we’re also collaborating with other authors who also rely on MS word to write in. Now I’m a 100% FOSS advocate, but this is a sticking point my partner has had, and I agree with them, at least in practice that realistically, we need a windows machine laying around specifically for this one, particular use case.
Now my thinking here is to use proxmox to spin up a windows machine as a VM, something we can remote into. Is there any best practice for something like this? How would this work with licensing? I personally haven’t installed windows on something since like windows 7, and I know they’ve enshittified beyond recognition.
I personally don’t want windows on my machines. But realistically, I recognize its necessity for this one particular use case. Thoughts?
Working in Remote Desktop for an extended amount of time is no fun. It’s possible, but you need the right version of windows and office to do that.
I wouldn’t want to rely on complex solutions like that for an essential for work. Now you have to administrate your local computer and the remote server. You also rely on a bunch of things going right to be able to use it from on the go: Internet connection on the go that doesn’t filter Remote Desktop, Home Internet connection, proxmox configuration and updates being okay. If you want to add a VPN on top, you get more possible failure points
So run a windows VM directly on your Linux machine. No need to make it more complicated. At least then you don’t depend on a working internet connection.
Alternatively try to run MS Word using WINE on Linux. This might work or break randomly.
If you don’t want to buy a license for office or windows use these scripts.
You really seem to need MS Office. It’s not necessary to make your life harder by building complex solutions. Run windows if it makes your life easier.
Other alternative: buy an Apple device and run MS Office for Mac. That’s the only reliable way to use it without windows.
Adding on to this, if you will run your VM locally, try WinBoat.
It handles installing Windows for you, integrates the filesystem and uses RDP to show the app windows, so you can use them side-by-side your Linux apps instead of having to always look at the full Windows Desktop.