WinBoat Broke, Windows Kept Running: dockurr/windows with Plain Podman

Table of Contents Table of Contents What dockurr/windows Actually Is What Was Left in the Storage Directory Bringing It Back With One Command NETWORK=nat Silently Became passt Checking That It Works Without Touching a Mouse Making It Permanent With a Quadlet What It Uses: RAM, CPU and Disk WinBoat or Plain dockurr/windows? Caveats Conclusion A few weeks ago I set up WinBoat on my Fedora laptop. WinBoat is a nice Electron frontend that runs Windows applications as if they were Linux windows. It worked. Then I did some housekeeping on the machine, removed things I thought I no longer needed, and the WinBoat UI stopped finding its Windows. The interesting part is that WinBoat never was the Windows machine. It is a frontend for dockurr/windows, a container image that runs Windows in QEMU with KVM. The VM itself is a disk image plus a few state files in a directory. My cleanup had removed the container and the image. It had not touched the directory. The short version: one podman run with…