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What is the function of virtual box and wine ? And if they have the same function which is better?

I got confused in choosing program to load my windows stuff

Pilot6
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Jonathan Willianto
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2 Answers2

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Virtualbox allows you to install other operating systems inside Ubuntu. You can install a real Windows this way.

All programs will run in it. But this requires a lot of RAM an CPU power, because a virtual machine can use only part of these resources.

Wine allows you to run some Windows programs in Ubuntu. Not all programs will run well, some will not run at all.

Pilot6
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Wine

Pros: You can run some Windows apps without needing Windows.

Cons: Only some Windows apps will work.

VirtualBox

Pros: You can run virtually any Windows app.

Cons: You need a pretty beefy computer to run VirtualBox effectively, and a full install of Windows.

If the apps you need, run via Wine, then I would say that is the best choice. If not, VirtualBox is a good choice.

If you have a copy of Windows with a valid license and if your hardware is powerful enough, then virtualbox would definitely be the way to go.

However, lacking a copy of Windows with a valid license or lacking sufficient hardware, then wine, playonlinux or crossover (I think that's what it is called) would probably be the better choice

Reference: This post by anewguy at Wine Vs Virtual Box

Community
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Ravan
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  • But anyway is a 2.2 GHZ computer with 1 GB RAM considered beefy now? – Jonathan Willianto Aug 21 '15 at 16:14
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    You need to attribute this. You copied this from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1916805&p=11648126. – Martin Thornton Aug 21 '15 at 16:20
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    @JonathanWillianto Good God no. "Beefy" is at least Core i5 and 8GB RAM. – TheWanderer Aug 21 '15 at 16:21
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    Upgrade that RAM to 4GB and it will run VBox with Windows 7 easily. I do it all the time on mine, and in fact, I've run all of these OS's at once on 2.2GHz dual core with 6GB of RAM: 4 instances of Windows 7, Ubuntu 15.04, CentOS 4.8, and Windows 10. That's a total of 7 OS's running on one machine. You should be able to run Windows 7 if you upgrade your RAM to at least 4GB – Daniel Aug 21 '15 at 16:34
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    I have run VB for years on 4GB RAM and 2GHz processor. Just recently got a 4x processor @2 GHz and 8GB RAM. It was a little sluggish before, and now less sluggish, but for my work, it is suitable even for working with video editing. --- 1GB RAM? - No way! – Buck Aug 21 '15 at 16:46