3 Windows-exclusive apps that actually run fine in Linux (and how I make them work)

Published Oct 12, 2026, 12:30 PM EDT Arol is a tech journalist who currently works as a contributor at How-To Geek since 2022. He first began writing online for the short-lived portal of Spanish-language gaming forum Emudesc in 2013. Years later, in 2017, he got his true start in tech journalism working for a small Google-focused site called Pixel Spot. He transitioned to a news and feature writer role at XDA Developers that same year, where he worked until 2021 before making the jump to other websites. Arol brings nearly a decade of writing experience, and the occasional hot take, to his writings. While he's a technology lover at heart, he holds computer hardware and smartphones particularly close to heart. You'll normally find him covering news, although he has also written the occasional deal, buyer's guide, how-to post, and round-up. He's also written for Android Police and MakeUseOf. He's also a Political Science student. When he's not writing, you'll probably find him hitting the gym, trying to ace a new hobby, reading his textbooks, or traveling. You can reach him at me@arolwright.com. Linux has never been short on alternatives, but some Windows programs simply don’t have a true replacement. Or you might just want the actual Windows version—that's fine too. If you pick the right method, though, you can run almost anything. Here's a nice rundown of some apps you might have been missing from Windows. Adobe Photoshop via patched Wine For years, running Photoshop on Linux meant settling for an old release like CS6 or setting up a full virtual machine. The application itself was never the main obstacle. The real problem was the Creative Cloud installer, which depends on Windows components that stock Wine couldn’t handle, particularly its MSXML3 and MSHTML implementations. The installer behaves like an embedded web page that expects Internet Explorer-era behavior, and it would fail before anything got installed. That changed in early 2026, when a developer known as PhialsBasement published a set of Wine patches aimed at exactly those failures. The fixes wrap problematic data in CDATA sections to get past strict XML parsing, correct how Wine handles certain identifiers, and make the environment respond to events the way Internet Explorer 9 would. With them applied, the installers for Photoshop 2021 and Photoshop 2025 complete, and the developer reported both versions running smoothly afterward. The patches were first proposed to Valve’s Wine fork, which pointed the developer toward upstream WineHQ instead. The way I approach it is to keep everything isolated. Rather than compiling Wine yourself, you can download the prebuilt patched build from the developer’s wine-adobe-installers repository on GitHub, extract it to its own folder, and create a Wine prefix used only for Adobe software. That way, nothing you change in your regular Wine setup can break Photoshop, and the reverse is also true. From there, you run the Creative Cloud setup file through the patched Wine binary, sign in with your Adobe account, and install Photoshop as you would on Windows. It isn’t flawless, mind you. Drag and drop has been reported as unreliable, particularly under Wayland, and GPU-accelerated features depend heavily on your graphics drivers. You’re also relying on unofficial patches, so a Creative Cloud update can break things without warning. Still, it might just be the most practical route Linux has ever had. FL Studio via Bottles Bottles turns FL Studio into a manageable Linux app FL Studio has long been one of the friendlier Windows programs to run under Wine, and Bottles makes the process much easier than managing prefixes by hand. Bottles is a graphical front end that creates self-contained Windows environments, each with its own runner, dependencies, and settings. Image-Line doesn’t officially support Linux, but the community has documented the setup well, including a popular GitHub guide by Torbuntu that users on the official FL Studio forum have confirmed works. My preferred setup starts with the Flatpak version of Bottles from Flathub. You create a new bottle using the Application environment, which preloads sensible defaults, then run the FL Studio installer from inside it. Once installation finishes, Bottles adds the program to its library, and you can create a desktop shortcut so it launches like any other app. Because Flatpak is sandboxed, it can’t see your other drives by default, so a tool like Flatseal is useful for granting access to your sample libraries and project folders. Audio is where most of the tuning happens. FL Studio relies on ASIO for low-latency playback, and ASIO doesn’t exist on Linux. Many users get acceptable results with FL Studio’s bundled ASIO driver running on top of PipeWire, which most modern distributions now ship by default. Those after lower latency can install WineASIO to route audio directly to JACK or PipeWire. In either case, expect to experiment with buffer sizes to balance latency against crackling. Third-party plugins are the other variable. Many Windows VSTs install directly into the same bottle and load inside FL Studio without extra steps, though plugins with online activation or aggressive copy protection can be hit or miss. If you later move to a native Linux DAW such as Bitwig or Reaper, yabridge can wrap those same Windows plugins so they load there. Microsoft Office via WinApps / WinBoat A real Windows VM disguised as native Linux windows Credit: Tony Phillips/How-To Geek Microsoft Office is the hardest of the three to get right through Wine. Older releases like Office 2016 can be made to work with some effort, but Microsoft 365, with its modern installer, account sign-in, and frequent updates, is a different story. That’s why the most reliable approach skips compatibility layers entirely and runs Office on real Windows, without making you look at Windows. WinApps and WinBoat both take this route. Each runs a full Windows installation in the background, either as a virtual machine or inside a Docker or Podman container based on the dockur/windows project. They then use FreeRDP together with Microsoft’s RemoteApp protocol to send individual programs to your desktop. The result is that Word, Excel, and Outlook appear as separate windows next to your Linux apps, with their own launcher entries, instead of being confined to a VM window. Your Linux home folder is shared with the Windows guest, so opening and saving documents works as you’d expect. The difference between the two comes down to convenience. WinApps is script-driven and configured through a text file, which suits people comfortable in a terminal. WinBoat offers the same idea through a polished Electron interface that handles installation, detects installed apps automatically, and lets you open the full Windows desktop when you need it. Its 0.9.0 release added Podman support and the ability to launch Microsoft Store apps. I’d recommend WinBoat for most people simply because the setup is less error-prone. With either tool, you need hardware virtualization through KVM, a reasonable amount of spare RAM and storage, and a valid Windows license. Because Office is running on genuine Windows, compatibility is essentially perfect, including macros and add-ins. The right method makes Windows apps work on Linux Linux no longer forces you to give up Photoshop, FL Studio, or Office. Patched Wine, Bottles, and container-based tools like WinBoat each solve a different problem, and matching the right one to each app is what makes the experience usable rather than merely possible.