by TibixDev | 2025-09-02 13:15:00+00:00
Hey HN, creator here. (I added my HN profile to GitHub Socials if you'd like to verify)

Honestly, I did not expect WinBoat to blow up as much as it did. I have never released desktop software before that got this large of an audience, I'm equally amazed and humbled by how many people decided to try it and how many different ways there are for things to break. Thanks to each and every one of you who decided to take WinBoat for a spin.

I deliberately did not post on HN, even though I've been recommended to do so. I'm not saying you folks are necessarily mean, but from years of reading I've come to learn that HN has a very critical eye. WinBoat is not feature-complete or an entirely stable experience, so I don't consider it worthy for HN. As such, I'm sorry if I disappointed anyone.

I'll try to answer some of your questions or criticisms honestly without bs.

Q: Why the hype if it's not seamless? A: No software will ever perfect, but almost all programmers dream of people one day trying their software. In my view, you have to convince people to try it, then you have to improve it, and then perhaps you can scrape off the Beta label and hope your code stays 100% true to what was promised. This framework doesn't function without people with different machines and setups trying out your software and giving feedback. Alternatively, you could make your tagline "Run Windows apps on Linux with seamless integration (If Docker, Linux, Windows, X11, XWayland, Wayland, and FreeRDP decide to perfectly work together in harmony)", but who would ever write such a tagline?

Q: What's WinBoat? A: An Electron app, a Windows VM in Docker, FreeRDP (with RemoteApps), and a Golang HTTP server largely running PowerShell scripts mashed together into something that's supposed to make your life using Windows apps on Linux easier. It's supposed to be easy and elegant.

Q: Why not use Wine instead? A: Wine is great, you can and most likely should use Wine for all the apps which it works for. WinBoat is more useful for apps that do not play well with Wine, and there's no shortage of such apps.

Q: Why not use WinApps instead? (Directly from winboat.app) A: With WinApps you do the bulk of the setup manually, and there's no cohesive interface to bring it all together. There's a basic TUI, a taskbar widget, and some CLI commands for you to play with. WinBoat does all the setup once you have the pre-requisites installed, displays everything worth seeing in a neat interface for you, and acts like a complete experience. No need to mess with configuration files, no need to memorize a dozen CLI commands, it just works.

Q: Why not contribute to WinApps instead to make it better? A: Their methodology is different. Not worse, just different. They have individual bash scripts that do certain things and leave the rest to the end user. They most definitely don't want Electron, and I don't want a collection of bash scripts the user has to tangle with. We have shared ideals, just go about achieving them differently. That doesn't mean one is better or worse than the other.

Q: Is the text written by AI? A: No, I suspect emojis have something to do with folks saying that it's AI, but it's not. In my opinion emojis just provide a nice visual distinction and make the text a bit more colorful. But I also realize in hindsight that AI-s also write in this style sometimes.

Q: Is WinBoat some vibecoded slop? A: No, I've poured dozens of hours of my time, knowledge, and passion into it. I don't claim to be the best programmer, or hell, even a good one at that, but I'm pretty sure you can't tell Cursor to make WinBoat from scratch and see a functional app an hour later. Much like anyone else, I use Cursor to get small, targeted tasks done and/or autocomplete where appropiate.