You do not have to choose one system forever. Plenty of people live in fast, free Ubuntu all day and step into Windows only when a document truly needs real Office. Here are the three honest ways to set that up — pick by your hardware and your patience.
Each route below trades something. Dual boot trades convenience for full speed. A virtual machine trades RAM for never rebooting. Remote access to a second machine trades hardware for zero local cost. There is no best one — there is the one that matches your PC, your licence and your documents.
Real Windows installed beside Ubuntu on the same machine. Office runs at full speed with real drivers, real activation and zero compatibility questions — because it is simply a Windows PC whenever you boot it as one.
The costs are the reboot every time you switch, disk space permanently given to two systems, and Windows doing its update routine on its own schedule. Dual boot suits long Office sessions — a full day of accounts work, a big presentation build — far better than five-minute document checks.
The VM from the virtual machine guide in this series, used as a part-time tool. Switch in seconds, snapshot before updates, and shut it down when the Office work is done so Ubuntu gets its RAM back.
It needs a machine with 8 GB of RAM or more to feel good and generally its own Windows licence. In return it is the route most people end up happiest with for short, frequent bursts of real Office during a Linux day.
An old Windows laptop or a small office PC does the Office work on real hardware, and Ubuntu reaches it over the network. Remmina, the standard remote desktop client, installs with sudo apt install remmina and connects in a couple of clicks.
Your Ubuntu machine stays light and fast, and the Windows box can be as old as Office tolerates. The price is a second machine to maintain and a hard dependency on your network — when the network sulks, so does your Word.
Whichever route you pick, this rule decides whether the setup feels smooth or chaotic — one home for documents. A data partition both systems can read, a OneDrive folder, or one synced folder on the network. Pick one, and let everything live there.
Version chaos is the real enemy, not the operating system. The moment your folders hold report_final, report_final2 and report_FINAL_REAL side by side, no operating system on earth can tell you which one is true.
The setup is only half the answer; the habit is the other half. The rhythm that works for most people looks like this — Linux for mail, browsing, coding and media. Documents drafted in OnlyOffice or LibreOffice, which handle ninety percent of files without drama. Windows time batched — saved up for the two jobs only it does, macro workbooks and pixel-perfect print runs.
Batching is what stops the tax — rebooting, VM startup, walking to the second machine — from being paid ten times a day. Pay it once, do every Windows job in that sitting, and go back to your real system.
Wine sits between pure Linux and these dual setups — watch the video method and place it honestly in your own mix.
▶️ Watch Full VideoOn a decent PC, the virtual machine — no reboots, and Office behaves perfectly inside it. On a low-RAM machine, dual boot wins because Windows gets the whole computer when it runs.
Yes. A shared NTFS data partition or a synced cloud folder works for both. Just avoid editing the same file from two places at the same time, and let one copy be the newest by habit.
Probably. The web apps plus LibreOffice cover most student work comfortably. This dual setup earns its complexity when your income depends on Office files behaving exactly right.