Running Windows desktop tests from Linux with disposable VMs (qawolf.com)
77 points by jadenlemmon 7 hours ago
trollbridge 6 hours ago
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 6 hours ago
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 6 hours ago
To be fair, you never needed LLMs to be able to do all that.
mcoliver 5 hours ago
rsolva 6 hours ago
alasano 6 hours ago
joinjune 6 hours ago
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.
Luker88 6 hours ago
what is the minimum license that I would need to do this legally, with just one or two VMs?
OneDeuxTriSeiGo 6 hours ago
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...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...
jadenlemmon 6 hours ago
it depends on where you are running it. If using a cloud provider, license is typically built into hourly price.
xlazom00 5 hours ago
This is super slow solution I did build similar solution based on dockur. And it was sooo slow. Just use windows docker containers on windows server. With some hacks you can run any gui application.
defied 6 hours ago
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.
madduci 5 hours ago
Same here, we used Proxmox as host to spin up ready images built with Packer and starting them with Vagrant to provision the app on the system under test, the whole triggered by the CI build
ranger_danger 6 hours ago
Why not use snapshots/save states so the VMs start back up right away? This is what I do with QEMU.
ProblemExplorer 6 hours ago
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 6 hours ago
> 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).
ProblemExplorer 5 hours ago
fhn 3 hours ago
thanks for the advertisement
itissid 6 hours ago
Why is the comments from the OP marked as flagged or dead at the bottom?
realusername 6 hours ago
Looks like AI written so it got auto-flagged by a bot probably
msla 4 hours ago
What's the licensing on Windows 11 these days? Can an individual still run an unregistered Windows 11 installation basically forever with only minor restrictions?
jadenlemmon 4 hours ago
For an individual, mostly yes. Unactivated will just keep running with a watermark & some minor restrictions.
blahgeek 6 hours ago
Nothing new here. VM + WebRTC + warm pool to absorb boot time
jadenlemmon 7 hours ago
I work at QA Wolf and lead the development of automated testing for Windows desktop apps. I wanted to share what we did and how we did it.
This post covers how we added Windows to a test infrastructure built around Linux runners. The central problem was giving each test a clean, logged-in Windows desktop without waiting 2–3 minutes for a VM to boot.
We extended the device scheduler we already use for mobile testing. It maintains warm pools of Windows VMs on GCE. Each test claims a ready VM, uses it once, and releases it. The VM is then destroyed and replaced, rather than cleaned up for the next test.
The test code stays in a Linux pod. Playwright connects to browsers on the Windows machine over CDP, while WebdriverIO and Appium handle native apps through WinAppDriver. A small Go agent captures the desktop with FFmpeg and streams it over WebRTC for live viewing and recordings.
That separation lets a single test move between a browser and a native Windows app without requiring a separate Windows runner pipeline.
The trade-off is that we keep idle Windows VMs ready and install the app under test on every run. In exchange, tests don’t inherit another run’s files, registry changes, or saved sessions.
I’d love to answer any questions!