What can you do if you HAVE to use Windows® based applications? Are you out of luck?
I do a lot of developing of industrial control systems using PLCs and HMIs from various vendors; Allen-Bradley, Omron, Siemens, AutomationDirect and others. All of the development environments utilize Windows O/S (in various flavors).
Inasmuch as I would love to give Windows the old heave ho, unless and until I can use Linux to run these applications, Linux is little more than a plaything to me.
See my post this thread at #102. It might help. While I was specifically talking about Virtual Machines for industrial type applications, VMs are for anyone who has a few legacy apps that they just can't give up yet.
One thing that is important about running a virtual machine is that you should not be stingy with ram. Your computer will be using memory for the base operating system, as well as the virtual machine. Memory is a cheap trade off for the benefits IMO.
No. Wine development is getting better and better as more coders look at the underlying commands and figure out how to implement them with emulation, which is becoming more and more feasible as processor speeds and system memory increase over time. Also, as some have already mentioned, you can run a Virtual session under Linux which gives you all the advantages of running a much faster system on an older program without the same speed bottlenecks that might have hindered you in the past. The only drawback is a decrease in speed compared to if you were able to run those same programs in a native Linux version, but think of the possibilities instead!
Running a VM will mean that the software you need sees only what it needs to, and any difficulties arising can be quickly remedied with a simple re-launch of the VM when necessary. Much better than having to reinstall and then reconfigure an entire OS and third-party software programs every time.