I’d like to see a RouterOS GUI client like WinBox one day which works on Linux and BSD (and Mac maybe).
Do you have plans and manpower to develop it?
We can access our routers with OpenSSH, mactelnet and run WinBox in WINE of course, but native GUI would be better.
winbox works perfectly in linux with wine. Years using it…
Wine is designed to run on x86 plaform. How about arm platform? Many new devices are based on arm. On Raspberry pi 3, i succesfully running winbox.exe after installing Exagear Desktop. Commercial from eltechs.com
Not really working perfectly for me when using Ubuntu 17:10 Wine,
In Ip Neighbors works only when router has DHCP running but will not list routers when removed?
No drag and drop from desktop to winbox or reverse?
I’d much rather have one really good windows app than have the winbox team spread out across multiple platforms.
Besides, there’s not a single scenario where you’d absolutely need to have winbox on another platform anyway. If wine doesn’t work for whatever reason, there’s dual booting, VMs, or even having a dedicated windows machine(PCs are cheap..)
But ROS is built on a Linux Kernel and I don’t want a Winbox but a “Linbox” version and why there isn’t a linux version is a mystery?
There is already linux style option - SSH CLI
If you like click with mouse in windows then it is time for Windows…
It’s no mystery to me that mikrotik picked the most popular platform in the world for their config utility… (and not .0000…00001% of people who use linux and mikrotik)
Winbox is essentially just a graphical representation of cli so even though routeros is built on the linux kernel, there would be zero benefit to having a linbox version anyway.
We have found that using windows on installation laptops that their network adapters have to be reset on a regular basis and not sure if running on Linux that the same will occur?
Not every Linux user is a strange person who loves command line, edits texts in vi (or ed ), etc. LinBox would be great, because WINE is not exactly light dependency. On the other hand, there are fifty Windows users for every Linux user, so the extra work might not seem worth it for MikroTik. Especially since there’s a way how to use WinBox on Linux.
If you need to reset your network adapters on a regular basis, you’re definitely doing something wrong..
There doesn’t have to be 2 separate apps, Mikrotik can abandon WinBox, it’s UI looks a little archaic anyway and release a cross-platform Qt app 
Having only a console/terminal interface is less convenient for many people, same as having only GUI app. If it was OpenWrt, I’d go with SSH but RouterOS is more complicated and GUI allows for faster overview of every available feature and settings. The true way for Mikrotik is having both console and GUI.
The problem with WINE as people have already said is that it requires lots of deps and many libs have to be built as 32-bit version, it’s an overkill for using a small app (WinBox) not so often.
Same for dual-booting, VMs with Windows and buying “cheap PSs” (requires space and power) and Windows license.
Also, I couldn’t find out how to read changelog for RouterOS updates in SSH session, I use WinBox for that.
I hope that mikrotik will not abandon the winbox. It is really useful and advantageous.
They would be crazy to abandon it, it’s the killer feature, at least for me. But rewriting it as cross-platform (one code that you can compile for Windows, Linux, …) could make sense in long term. But from a selfish perspective of Windows user who likes current WinBox, there’s million of more useful things they could do.
Exactly.
lol this isn’t a calculator app.. not only is the approach to writing a cross-platform app entirely different, but winbox is deeply integrated with routeros which means they would have to rewrite that too… Do you have any idea how many additional variables and subsequent bugs that would introduce?
It’s perfect as-is and the “archaic” ui is extremely functional, lightweight, no-nonsense - the kind of tool that the vast majority of mikrotik users love. They have been polishing it for over a decade so there is no way they are going to abandon/radically change it.
Let’s hope Mikrotik don’t fix the “archaic” appearance of Winbox by turning it into some low-contrast abomination with gradient blends and animations.
The fact that Winbox works very well in wine must meet some definition of “cross-platform”. I have seen screenshots on Mikrotik.com of Winbox running in wine so I am reasonably certain that winbox developers are testing winbox in wine, not just on Windows.
Webfig is the real cross-platform interface. It’s not far off Winbox; just needs an easier way of opening multiple windows.
It would be good if Winbox could read/write backup files and/or the output of /export
+1 - I love Mikrotik but have no Windows machine. i work with Linux and MacOS. Linux is mich closer to Milrotik wjen it comes to scripting.
Web and SSH are already as cross-platform as it is possible to be. On top of that, Mikrotik’s feature-complete CLI is much easier to use and learn than competitors, afaik.
No one but some subset of power users would want anything more, and power users already have access to emulators and VMs, including entirely for free.
Those who keep asking for some native-like, cross-platform GUI solution are simultaneously severely underestimating both the high upfront development costs and long term support costs. Instead of effectively one platform on by far the most popular non-mobile, native GUI in the world - if it wasn’t Windows it would be something else - now Mikrotik would have to test and support all additional platforms forever.
All the while, there would be significant inefficiencies across the board in having at least two well-developed GUIs, assuming a perfect overlap with a cross-platform library (!). Adding or improving features to all these advanced user interfaces would also suffer. There is also no guarantee of being able to replicate the responsiveness or all the GUI features of the current Winbox. So, now you risk a trade-off …
Such enormous use of resources that could be better spent right now to bring real features to you makes zero sense.
You could be asking Mikrotik for significant features compared to the market, features reducing wasted time, features broadening access to more customers, features making your purchases inherently more valuable to you, features bringing the product up to date, or enabling you to recommend them wholeheartedly to others.
Even the most fundamental things like a public bug tracker and public feature request tracker - where you could have put these requests for visibility or voting - are missing …
What are you thinking?
Mikrotik is no small company. If they don‘t have the recources to develop for multiple operating systems it would be seriously conceirn me.
The most used system on the road is Android an iOS - not Windows.