Winlator is an Android application that lets you to run Windows (x86_64) applications with Wine and Box86/Box64.
Version 3.0 Changelog:
- Improved Audio Plugin
- Added PulseAudio
- Added the option to choose the Box86/Box64 version
- Added the option to choose the Turnip version
- Added Custom resolution option
- Improved Input Controls
- Improved Lock Cursor option
- Added Task Manager to main menu
- Updated OBB Image to version 3
- Other bug fixes and improvements
When regular phones will be powerful enough to run complex windows apps a phone would be all you need. It will be a revolution.
I would say they already are: the snapdragon 8Gen2 has a GPU comparable to a desktop GTX 1050 (!!!) And the 8gen3 is like 50% faster as well
The limiting factor is still RAM, if you’re using more RAM intensive programs. Other than that, I’d pretty much agree.
Cooling is the major limiter for phones. They simply can’t dissipate the heat when running any kind of continuous load.
À lot of cheap phones start at 8 gigs of ram this days. That’s like entry level laptops
And MacBook Pros!
Haha, good one. If you try, you can even get a 12GB ram version from Chinese OEMs for cheap. Just remember it would be less than the Macbook Pro’s 8GB unified memory.
Fair enough.
It should be noted that while mobile GPUs may do well in terms of performance, their design makes it almost impossible to run any kind of Windows game on them. Mobile GPU hardware is optimised very differently so grabbing dxvk and Box64 and running a game won’t bring you anything close to what a 1050 can render. There are obvious performance issues with the instruction set difference as well, of course.
In a perfect world, we’d see Windows on ARM taking off once the exclusivity deal blows over. Games would still run slower than they could, but it’d help boost performance massively.
I knew it was powerful but i didn’t know that it was comparable to a gtx 1050 🤯.
Strong press X to doubt.
If it can run Sekiro for 5 mins before dying of overheating, it does not mean it is comparable.
It’s a phone, not a gaming rig. Office work and internet browsing is what most people do with computers . The OS just doesn’t need to lag while doing the above and that’s enough. Cooling could be done via the dock used to transform the phone as pc.
Many people nowadays use their phones for gaming, me included.
Your point is not valid.
Me too but you were talking about wanting to play a recent PC game on your phone. You play games natively made for phones or old games ported to the platform . Let’s not forget about emulation which is basically Pandora box. You have access to games from the nes library to the entire Nintendo switch library. You don’t need the OS part for this to work, it’s already there.
Seems comparable to me. How long could the 1050 run a game without active cooling?
Uhh… Goalpost move. Active cooling is part of the design.
Phones lack active cooling, which means performance can’t be the same for any meaningful length of time.
They already are, though. They sure won’t run many games, but any mid tier smartphone should perform relatively well compared to a computer from five or ten years ago.
In fact, several Lumia devices run Windows 11. Not Windows Phone, just plain old Windows 11. When you run ARM applications in them, they just work. And those things haven’t been sold since Windows Phone died!
The challenge is the ARM <-> amd64 translation step. There are tricks that can at least perform the system API calls at native speeds, but application code itself still needs to be emulated.
An iPhone is easily as fast as a modern laptop and I bet if Apple wouldn’t be so stuck up their own ass you’d be able to run applications in Wine just fine on there, even without hardware acceleration like on macs. Unfortunately, Apple’s competitors in mobile CPU land don’t come close to what Apple manages to produce in terms of raw performance.
Highly doubt that. For a lot of things other than consumption, it is very inconvenient to use. It’s somewhat better with a laptop or a larger tablet, but when portability is not that important, a desktop computer is always easier to use.
Phones are far cheaper than a computer tho. For people in third world country tech can be too expensive. Buying a 2 in 1 combo would be definitely great. Put the phone in a very basic dock with hdmi out and a few other ports and you have a family computer. Linux would be the ideal OS hopefully decreasing windows monopoly.
An android tablet with a detachable keyboard would be useful as personal laptop for students with limited income.
Phones are cheaper than a computer
Not at all. Mini PCs with way more power (cpu, ram, video, cooling) than a phone are as little as $100. That’s about the used price of many 3 year old phones.
These pc’s can run at higher performance levels, and far more continuously, than a phone can, since cooling on a phone is very limited.
My 200 dollar android smartphone breaks all my laptops in all the benchmarks I ran on it that cost so much more than it. Legitimately though, I guess it doesn’t mean that much since there is very little I can compare it with. Minus saying “Oh look wow this web assembly thing runs faster on my smartphone than my cheap computers from eBay!”. Or “Roblox can look and run so much better on my smartphone than on my computer and not run at 20 fps!” Or also “Look at this benchmarking tool it scores higher on my smartphone!” Or also also also “Look at me ma I’m running emulators and ruffle flash-player games faster in the web browser on my phone than on my computer that can’t even run Run 3 at max settings!” Or also also “Look ma I can run Fallout New Vegas at higher settings and higher resolution and framerate than my new cheap 100 dollar mini PC or laptop from eBay!”. Honestly though if you just gave me a real operating system with the terrible mid tier soc in my phone and shoved it into a laptop with a real operating system. I think I would like that a lot more than the 100 watts my biggest laptop draws from the outlet that can’t even hardware encode video with an 8th Gen core i7 Intel with dedicated amd graphics. Like imagine the kind of power-draw a phone soc would have on a normal laptop battery all without paying up the ass for something that has the screen kill itself in 3 years thanks apple. Though but seriously minus the non upgradability of arm MacBooks and anti-repair nonsense; Apple seriously did wonders in taking their mobile silicon and expanding it into something really really great in the traditional computing world and making a unique series of chips separate from their mobile counterparts. X86 needs to finally die. Anything else should be looked for in the future. It is embarrassing that my shitty low end smartphone out performs all the computers at my local Walmart.
For people in third world country tech can be too expensive.
That may be the case, but I wasn’t thinking about third world countries.
Yes if it’s impossible for you to buy one that’s a different thing, you are doomed to inconvenience and that’s sad, but if you can find the money for it, even if only after saving for 1-2 years for used hardware that you put into a half-decent case, it’s still much better. I would definitely do that as I have the thought of only having a phone that is only smart enough to mine theshitdata our of me, but otherwise very inconvenient and almost useless for daily things.I have recently bought a decent laptop with touchscreen and pen, it was cheaper than a lot of phones.
Yes this is not a desktop, but can be made into one as it runs regular Linux, has normal USB ports and support for external display.Another reason I don’t agree (or like it in case it will become true) that desktops will die out is that there are certain tasks really don’t work and will never work on phones: programming and other more involved and serious things. The phone is very small to fit all the the tool buttons you’ll use (especially with today’s bulky space wasting design where margins are everything), and the keyboard will hide half or more of the screen when opened. How do you see through what you have done so far? You don’t.
Another thing: I truly believe that for free communication that is not continuously analyzed by god-complex billionaires and their companies, more people needs to run peer to peer based software on some kind of device they own. It shouldn’t be rare anymore for that to happen. That won’t work with phones and portables: continous wireless traffic and such eats the battery. These P2P apps will need something that can be always online instead of them, so that they can work with acceptable resource usage.
Desktops are a good choice for both of these purposes, even more if set up to conserve power by turning off the graphics processor and such when they are not needed.
This is so cool! Oh man, I don’t even know what to begin testing with it.
Can you run Linux apps (eg from the AUR or flatpak) on Android?
For that you can use andronix, it allows you to install a distro on a proot, I’ve been using it for a while it’s quite nice
Does it run GUI apps ?
Yep, but not complex ones. Photoshop for instance will not work, same with the current version of Office 365. But older versions might work, eg Photoshop CS6, or Office 2015 etc. You can check https://appdb.winehq.org/ as a rough reference - bearing in mind that since you’re running this on ARM + emulated x86, there’s bound to be a lot more bugs.
Yes, you have to use a vnc client to connect to it as if you were connected to an external server.
I’ve just been using proot in termux for that
Is there a compatibility list like most emulators? I tried Spelunky and some other game but neither of them worked so I have up on Winlator, but I feel like I should really give it another try.
There isn’t one because this (PC emulation on Android) is a fast moving target with lots of different apps, with variations and combinations of both hardware and software. So if a particular game works for someone, there’s no guarantee that it can work for you, even if you’re on a similar setup. Eg, they could be using a different DKVK version or a different graphics driver and so in.
Also, Winlator is relatively new, you may have better luck with Box64Droid.
We have come full circle!
I installed the apk, and it immediately crashed saying ‘unable to install the obb image’
There is a separate file you have to download, it’s in the repo readme.
Thanks for the small accidental documentation
I did that and now I can run it, but when I tap the mouse doesn’t click.
Root required?
Nope! Makes no difference either way, as it runs using proot which is entirely in userspace.
How do you create the required folder without root?
Just launch the app once, it’ll automatically create the folder. You can then access it from a file manager. I used Solid Explorer but any file manager should work.
Installed it on my Fold 5 and runs great until opening Wine internet explorer and it asks to install Gecko to render html. After downloading, it freezes and crashes.
Eew, this should not exist.
You shouldn’t exist.
