Hey Home-labbers/ self hosters.
This weekend my 10 year old processing machine finally bit the dust (RIP 🗿 💀 ; old system76 laptop, won’t even post, not the topic of this thread but if you’ve got ideas, I’m all ears), and as part of figuring out what happened and coming to the realization its time for a new machine. And as part of getting/ pricing a new machine (not looking forward to the consequences of the RAM-pocalypse), I’ve been reviewing/ thinking about the “structure” of what we as a household currently use our self-hosted/ home-labbed system for.
Myself and my partner are researchers, and as such, we regularly collaborate/ work together on manuscripts, and the reality is, we rely on windows because we’re also collaborating with other authors who also rely on MS word to write in. Now I’m a 100% FOSS advocate, but this is a sticking point my partner has had, and I agree with them, at least in practice that realistically, we need a windows machine laying around specifically for this one, particular use case.
Now my thinking here is to use proxmox to spin up a windows machine as a VM, something we can remote into. Is there any best practice for something like this? How would this work with licensing? I personally haven’t installed windows on something since like windows 7, and I know they’ve enshittified beyond recognition.
I personally don’t want windows on my machines. But realistically, I recognize its necessity for this one particular use case. Thoughts?
If the only thing you need is not even the whole Office suite but just a Word processor (and not even any particular version) and since you’ll be remoting to it for the graphical access, you don’t need to spin up a whole Windows VM for that. You can just spin up something with Wine and install the Word component from Office 2013 on that (I’d say Office 2013 at most; you might be able to get away with Office 2007 but I wouldn’t recommend it).
Better yet, Libre Office. Fully compatible with MS formats plus ODF (which Microsoft now supports too btw)