Ideas for improvements to installation & setup

[eylenburg]

I have experimented with various ways to run MS Office on Linux and I think Winapps has come a long way and is the best way to do it by now. I documented my setup process here, which includes some troubleshooting not part of the current documentation: https://gist.github.com/eylenburg/38e5da371b7fedc0662198efc66be57b#option-1-running-any-office-version-including-365-with-winapps

I think ultimately it would be great for Winapps to become really easy to set up, especially for people trying Linux for the first time who are thinking of switching and require some Windows app. So ideally setting up Winapps is done in a few clicks without much tinkering and thinking.

I think there's a couple of ways to improve the current process.

Installation & Dependencies

Currently, you need to figure out the dependencies yourself, e.g. decide whether you want to use Podman, Docker or Libvirt, then install the correct packages for your distro. Then also get FreeRDP. And then in my case it turned out i also needed to install dialog and netcat to get the installer.sh to run. Also you need to clone the Github repo, which is unfamiliar for many people. So it would be great to have a DEB/RPM package for Winapps that then also takes care of installing the dependencies (e.g. Podman, Podman-Compose, FreeRDP and whatever is needed for the installer).

Setting up the VM

I think this is the most important bit because right now it's very confusing to understand what you have to do. There's so many options and pitfalls.

It would be nice to have an optional install wizard (TUI or GUI) that walks you through setting up the VM. It should just default to say, Podman, the Tiny11 container, and a default username/password. Maybe the only questions asked would be (a) localisation settings (like detect what Linux is using for system language, keyboard layout and time zone and ask for user confirmation), (b) what storage, RAM and CPU you want to give to the VM, and (c) if you want your Windows VM to autostart or not.

The different steps to install Windows as described here, which involve setting up the container with compose.yaml for the first time, then later commenting out the OEM line and putting the container "down" and setting it "up" again with the amended compose.yaml - all this should ideally happen automatically.

Also there should be some fixes automatically applied to the Windows VM that otherwise lead to a bad experience with Winapps. I myself identified and bug reported these:

• Keyboard layout not respected by FreeRDP. Fixed with [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout] add a new DWORD IgnoreRemoteKeyboardLayout with value 1
• Time zone offset. Fixed with [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation] add new DWORD RealTimeIsUniversal with value 1
• Auto-login prevents FreeRDP from connecting. Fixed with runinng netplwiz and check the [x] Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer option

Small bits

Currently, if you want to add more Windows apps, you first need to uninstall Winapps before you can install it again.

Winapps tray icon applet could be auto-installed rather than being a separate thing