Yet another Hacker News

Running Windows desktop tests from Linux with disposable VMs

33 points jadenlemmon 1 hour ago 17 comments

trollbridge 1 hour ago | parent

Not to dismiss this, but when I was working on a problem on Windows recently my LLM (6.1 Sol / oh-my-pi) ended up doing the same thing, although it used Qemu and snapshots to accomplish that.

Eventually it got to a point it could iterate very quickly and was really only constrained by total system RAM which meant a dozen at most copies could be running simultaneously.

mcoliver 51 minutes ago | parent

Same. It's quite remarkable. Two other things Claude and I have done. I have a spare workstation running proxmox in my garage. Claude can now create, snapshot, delete, extend, start, and restart vms. It's been great. I also have skills that allow it to spin up spot instances when I need to test things that rely on hardware I don't have like certain Nvidia gpus or 100gb networking. What a time to be alive.

trollbridge 24 minutes ago | parent

To be fair, you never needed LLMs to be able to do all that.

rsolva 16 minutes ago | parent

To be fair, often you have good ideas, but not enough time. I have had a lot of fun having Qwen3.8 27b running at home, having it explore and implement ideas that was way to ambitious for the time I had available to tinker with Home Assistant and Proxmox. It is an enabler and can also be a good tutor, when used as such. I have learned a lot.

alasano 14 minutes ago | parent

"be able" implying capability rather than time constraints and opportunity cost which is what most people on here refer to when they mention something cool they're doing with LLMs that they weren't doing before.

blahgeek 51 minutes ago | parent

Nothing new here. VM + WebRTC + warm pool to absorb boot time

joinjune 50 minutes ago | parent

We used several different LLM's and our own skills to build out some novel approaches to document creation with new workflows using QEMU in Linux after upgrading our desktops to Ubuntu from Windows 11.

ranger_danger 44 minutes ago | parent

Why not use snapshots/save states so the VMs start back up right away? This is what I do with QEMU.

ProblemExplorer 18 minutes ago | parent

Doesn't Windows do some drama if its not activated and has been running without a license for more than 48h or similar?

I don't use windows but have to run windows 11 VM to access special devices. I don't want to bother with licenses, although I have them, and creating a new incus QEMU VM from scratch everytime from an ISO takes ~5m, freeing me up from worrying about all the activation and license drama.

If the activation and license setup was easy/automated in QEMU, I would imagine snapshots would be way easier. I would prefer not needing to connect to the internet.

c-hendricks 11 minutes ago | parent

> Doesn't Windows do some drama if its not activated and has been running without a license for more than 48h or similar

Your info might be like decades out of date, since windows 10 it's just been an overlay and locking out some appearance customizations (you can still set them via other means though).

itissid 41 minutes ago | parent

Why is the comments from the OP marked as flagged or dead at the bottom?

realusername 37 minutes ago | parent

Looks like AI written so it got auto-flagged by a bot probably

defied 27 minutes ago | parent

We’ve been providing a similar approach with disposable VMs and emulators/simulators since 2014 at TestingBot. We run our own single-use QEMU VMs with Windows and Linux.

Luker88 23 minutes ago | parent

what is the minimum license that I would need to do this legally, with just one or two VMs?

OneDeuxTriSeiGo 10 minutes ago | parent

It depends what you need to run. There exist a number of Windows images which can be run without any paid license requirements for test and validation IIRC.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...

jadenlemmon 6 minutes ago | parent

it depends on where you are running it. If using a cloud provider, license is typically built into hourly price.