I currently do the majority of my Research on Ancestry, using RM10 as an offline backup, but also to amend Ancestry - especially place naming conventions ( Ancestry’s inconsistencies drive me mad!)
Anyway with the demise of Win 10 in October, and all three of my devices not being Win11 capable (at least without workrounds than M$ will probably disable randomly in future) I am looking at options
I could run on Win 10 but it needs to be online for Ancestry etc and security will become an issue
I will probably move to Linux Mint but I really have no experience with WINE and how well/if RM plays in Linux
as for the W10 issue coming in October (not being supported by Microsoft) that probably impact many users. Of course this is less a RM question / issue. I am not connected to RM in any way but – I do not think it would be a good idea to divert “resources” to build and support a third platform. There are not many companies (actually none I am aware of ) that build software to work for Win, Mac & Linux.
As to users running RM on Linux I have some users have been able to but not sure to what degree and how they did it and with what success.
One clear option to consider is to dump Microsoft for Mac OS which runs RM10 natively. You would get quality hardware and software for a similar price and a vastly superior user experience.
Given that you’re considering Linux, you’re probably at least somewhat technically inclined. So another option you might consider is a Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) conversion. There are various options out there for turning your physical PC into a virtualized one that can run as a program on your new platform.
In your case, you’d capture your existing Win10 PC that runs RootsMagic into a virtual system. The virtual PC can be configured to have Internet access through your host device, so staying connected to Ancestry for sync’ing is still possible. Once you’ve confirmed that the virtual PC functions properly, you can move it’s associated VHDs to a temporary safe place and reimage the physical PC as a Linux box. Once the Linux box is up and running, and has a suitable hypervisor running, you can move the Win10 VHDs over to it and launch the virtual PC.
The technicalities of it are beyond what I want to get into here on the RM forums, but just do a Google search of “P2V” and you’ll find all kinds of information. You can also skim this Reddit post for some hints.
I’ve been using a virtual machine running VirtualBox (free), it was my best solution.
My host OS is Ubuntu 24, the guest vm is Win10, where I run RM10. RM is one of the few Windows apps I still use.
With this config I particularly like having Ubuntu apps and browsers open at the same time as the VM is running W10 with RM open, and they can share the the mouse & keyboard, cut & paste, but I have lots of screen real-estate with three monitors to take advantage of that, not as useful with only one monitor.
VB allows W10 guest complete access to my host Internet, although I choose for security reasons to use the Linux browser windows to access the web and genealogy sites. For that reason only, I’m not as concerned about MS discontinuing W10 updates at this time.
Linux can be lean and fast, but Windows is not. To run a W10/W11 on a Linux host takes significant resources: disk space, graphics, RAM, and fast multiple cores. I am running VM with W10 on 14 yo PC, but at one time it was a high-end engineering workstation so I can get away with it. I might add, I cannot upgrade my VM with W11 because the underlying CPU does not have a Microsoft required feature, the same reason so many otherwise fine PC’s cannot be upgraded to W11.
Several years ago I had a lot of trouble with RM9 features not working with Win7, so I tried RM9 with Wine using Linux Mint 21, it fixed some issues but cause others. At that time I read on this forum that others were successful. It was because of these issues I researched and chose the VirtualBox solution, bought a cheap W10 license.
I doubt we’ll ever see a native Linux version of RM.
RM 10 doesn’t run natively on newer Mac computers (the ones with the M-series chips that began around 2020). RM 10 is an Intel-based app that runs under Rosetta on the new Macs.
If I’m wrong, please let me know where I can download a version of RM 10 that does run natively. I would love that because it would run faster on my machines.
In this image of the Get Info pane my RM 10 on my M2 Mac, it says Intel after the application name. If the app ran natively on my Mac, it would say “universal” instead of “intel.”
Intel code RM is all that is available but it does run without emulation on mac once translated by Rosetta. They should have an apple silicon version but most of their customers are probably Windows users the mac people having drifted away during the RM7 and 8 era.
