Budget-priced Windows license

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi,

I'm short in time, so just a brief reply to all the follow-ups.

Windows in a VM is more or less a real Windows with a few exceptions,
but the advantage that it can be restored either from a snapshot or
from a backup. Restoring a Windows on bare metal is not that
straightforward. I don't run realtime audio applications in a VM, since
those likely belong to the exceptions that won't work. I neither use
wine or wine-staging for realtime audio, but it likely has got realtime
capabilities.

An advantage of wine are the prefixes. I run several versions of a
guitar synth editor by different wine prefixes. It's a MIDI (music)
app, but not a realtime app, it's just an editor for a hardware guitar
synth. AFAIK that can't be done on a real Windows. Installing one
version requires to remove another version. This guitar synth editor
has got a native Linux version, but the Linux version isn't stable,
while the Windows versions are stable running on wine-staging.

There are different types of VMs. QEMU/KVM is fast with good hardware
access, but file sharing with the host is complicated. VirtualBox is
slow, with tricky hardware access, but OOTB it provides superduper file
sharing with the host. If file sharing isn't needed I'm using QEMU/KVM,
if file sharing is needed, I'm using VirtualBox.

One of the apps I need is iTunes. Even if it should run on wine today,
the next release probably doesn't run on wine anymore.

Btw. I dislike software piracy. OTOH Microsoft is an exception, there
are valid reasons why Microsoft doesn't deserve fairness. I don't want
to do piracy myself, hence I hope that somebody sells the license key
of a computer with Windows pre-installed, but a Windows that never was
activated, because the user deleted it and installed BSD or Linux.

Regards,
Ralf