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Show HN: Microsoft Office running with Wine on Linux with no virtualization

42 points tombert 20 hours ago 26 comments

Microsoft Office famously hasn't worked well with Wine since Office 2007. There are lots of solutions out there to work around this, but all of them involve fairly heavy virtualization.

Multiple people have told me that their biggest hangup for switching to Linux from Windows is the lack of the desktop version of Microsoft Office, and they don't want to run a VM to get around it.

I recently fell into a bunch of free time with a Claude Max subscription, so I got Fable to hack at this until it worked! And with this, we have Microsoft Office running on Linux, with no Windows in sight!

I can't promise that this will work on everyone's computer, but I did put this all in Nix Flakes, so ideally it should be relatively reproducible on any Linux system with the Nix package manager and Flakes enabled. Also, it does not work very well with X, but Wayland appears to work fine.

This is not warez. You need a valid license for Office 365 for this to work. You also need to register on Microsoft's website in a browser; the flow for registering in the app proved to be tricky and not worth pursuing.

This is more proof of concept than anything else; I have no doubt that there are bugs and improvements to be made. I have only tested this with NixOS on Sway and KDE, and as stated it only really works with Wayland and the absolute latest GE-Proton, but I believe it would work fine with Gnome or any other Wayland desktop.

Full disclosure, Claude Code with Fable did the vast vast majority of the work on this. I ended up primarily just reading log messages and complaining back to it.

overclock-api 19 hours ago | parent

Good work. I had assumed Office and Wine had been an unsolvable problem due to how long it had been around.

What specifically breaks? My understanding is that the modern version of Office is in reality a combination of many things: the licensing layer, the .NET bits, the Click-to-Run packaging, and finally the app. If it turns out that the real hard part is the licensing/activation flow rather than the app itself, that is a more interesting discovery in that the problem is less about the app itself and more about how the distribution works. Which might also explain why it got easier to tackle.

tombert 19 hours ago | parent

Actually not that much breaks now!

The hardest part was the activation, but some patience with Claude seemed to get that working.

At least with Sway, I had trouble getting anything with X11 working, particularly anything involve "pop ups". That includes right-click menus and stuff like that. Wayland works much better.

It also took a very long time to get the dictionary loaded for spell-check, and then a very long time to get the red squigglies working.

yjftsjthsd-h 7 minutes ago | parent

> At least with Sway, I had trouble getting anything with X11 working, particularly anything involve "pop ups". That includes right-click menus and stuff like that. Wayland works much better.

? Sway is a Wayland compositor

tombert 4 minutes ago | parent

I use it as my desktop environment. I was using XWayland at first to get this working since that was historically the norm with Wine stuff, but that ended up being really glitchy. The latest versions of Wine/Proton actually have native Wayland support though so once I forced that it ran significantly better.

I don't know if this is an XWayland problem, or a problem with X in general, since I don't have any computers running X anymore.

farseer 10 hours ago | parent

I feel like the entire world needs to take a plunge towards LibreOffice for the good of all.

cyanydeez 6 hours ago | parent

I've been trying to slowly do this. But muscle memory and visual cues, embedded for 15 years just keep winning.

None of my excel sheets are just numbers, they're tied to database pulls and those dont work either.

Just trying to do the same things like merge cells I'm searching through a bunch of menus wondering what the hell it's called.

Theres a gui that looks similar but not enough. If they really want adoption, they need to completely add a office-clone mode and accept the consequences.

tombert 1 hour ago | parent

I agree with you in principle, and I honestly genuinely kind of hate Microsoft Office and I haven't used it or LibreOffice since I learned how to do LaTeX and Pandoc and Typst.

That said, whether or not it should be the case, a lot of people want specifically proper noun Microsoft Office (TM), not something "as good or better" than Microsoft Office.

I think getting people people towards a less horrible computing setup, for most people, requires it being done incrementally.

Daviey 31 minutes ago | parent

The biggest blocker for me is having confidence my output renders the same with people using MS Office, pdf output isn't always sufficient.

MrDrMcCoy 22 minutes ago | parent

That has been a lot less of a problem lately. Why not try again and open a bug report if there's an issue?

afavour 2 minutes ago | parent

Because there’s no one and done testing for it. You need to check every document you make with Office (so you’re paying for Office anyway…) to ensure it’s correct.

hagbard_c 18 minutes ago | parent

As long as that is the goal Microsoft can block uptake of any competitor simply by making sure that is never achieved. They have a lot of history with this - DOS ain't done 'till 1-2-3 won't run etc. - so you can rest assured that they'll do it again. Maybe you should change your output so it isn't as reliant on 'rendering the same', i.e. make it less complex and with that less easy for Microsoft to claim the error lies with the other party? Word is not a DTP package nor a typesetter, it is a document editor. Fancy layout has never been the forte of this class of programs, they're meant to make sure the output works on different computers, different printers, different monitors.

revolvingthrow 28 minutes ago | parent

The network effect of social media has nothing on the network effect of ms office

brightball 18 minutes ago | parent

Makes me wonder about aiming all those subscriptions at LibreOffice. How fast could it be improved to gain parity or surpass MS Office?

Maybe the new Omarchy foundation thing will take it on. DHH has pretty publicly been asking for a version of office for Linux.

TiredOfLife 6 minutes ago | parent

That would require LibreOffice not being shit.

fluidcruft 2 minutes ago | parent

I can't tell what's going on with all the LibreOffice drama and whether it's a zombie on life support after the community management class kicked all the actual developers out.

alright2565 33 minutes ago | parent

I've done something similar with a CAD app, where I've used AI tools to package it as a Nix flake. It's a really good format for wine packaging since it makes it so easy to patch wine in ways that would never be accepted upstream, and it makes launching it just one command vs needing to deal with other people's potentially broken wine prefixes.

tombert 30 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, completely agree.

I absolutely love Nix Flakes; they feel, to me, like what Docker was supposed to be. A little self-contained packaged environment that gives you a place to do any kind of custom hacks deterministically.

jmkni 23 minutes ago | parent

What version of Office are we talking about?

tombert 16 minutes ago | parent

The latest version of Office 365. Well, latest as of about four or five days ago. It required me to buy a month of it for $15.

I have been trying to get one of those gray-market keys from Groupon working, but that has proven to be very difficult because there's a lot of weird kernel-level stuff going on for verification because those are done with volume-licenses. If I were willing to pay full-price for a regular Office 2024 Home and Business key I think it would be relatively easy to adapt this to get it working, but I don't want to sink $200 for software I'm unlikely to ever actually use.

PeterStuer 13 minutes ago | parent

365 on Linux with a sup? Why would MS not celebrate this? Windows consumer has been a loss leader for quite some time, and entreprise wont touch it till its 100% cleared.

robinpie 5 minutes ago | parent

Awesome!

TiredOfLife 3 minutes ago | parent

The bottles project https://x.com/brombinmirko also has been progressing with alpha being promised "soon"