: Ok... so could I run windows applications on a Linux OS? Or is this more of a hardware thing?
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In theory; yes, you could run windows apps in a windows emulator running on Linux, if a windows emulator existed. But, you probably wouldn't want to. GUI (Windows) OS's are extremely slow compared to command-driven OS's like MS-DOS or Comodore's Basic OS so running Windows apps in an emulator would slow them to a snails pace. Most people who want to run both Linux and Windows apps create two different bootable partitions on their hard drive, one for each OS. Either operating system is able to directly access the same hardware in the x86 machine, unlike the Commodore OS in an x86 based machine which would require an emulator to indirectly access the hardware. The speed loss caused by the emulator disecting each of the Commodore's 6510 microprocessor instruction is not important because todays x86 processors run so much faster than the old 6510 processor.