> I want to seamlessly run an occasional windows app in linux, and I would pay for it. Please define "seamless" in this context. If you mean that you want to

> I want to seamlessly run an occasional windows app in linux, and I would pay for it. Please define "seamless" in this context. If you mean that you want to have the running Windows apps appear as window in your Linux environment, VirtualBox has a Seamless mode that will do that. I haven't tried it, but what I find with Google seems to say it works as expected. VMware Fusion (on the Mac) has a similar mode called Unity. The VMware one seems to work well enough, but I haven't tried it extensively. If you want to be able to open files in Windows applications from your Linux environment, I'm not sure if this is possible. VMware Fusion (on the Mac) has this - I can right-click on files in the Mac and see various Windows programs on the "Open With" list. I don't know if this feature exists on VMware for Linux, but it would be worth investigating. I'm not aware of an equivalent with VirtualBox. Combined, these two features would probably give you the closest thing to a seamless environment that you can get. If you just want to run Windows on Linux and are willing to put up with the friction of using a VM, VirtualBox does a decent job and makes it fairly painless.