4 ms·
It is a superb project, and a hard thing to do. It is a pity that the apps most business people use everyday, like Word and Excel and Outlook don't work in it
by RachelF 7mo ago
It is a superb project, and a hard thing to do.
It is a pity that the apps most business people use everyday, like Word and Excel and Outlook don't work in it (Excel 2010 is the last version that has Platinum status). It is interesting that these are harder to get working than games.
- coldpie 7mo ago> It is interesting that these are harder to get working than games. Games are mostly just doing their own thing, only interacting with the system for input & output. MS Office is using every single corner of Windows: every feature in the XML libraries, tons of .NET type stuff, all the OLE and COM and typelib and compound storage features, tons of Explorer integrations, auto-updating stuff via Windows patching mechanisms... there's almost no corner of the Windows OS that MS Office doesn't use.
- joe_mamba 7mo agoYou're onto something but that's not entirely true for all games. There's plenty of vintage games, made before DirectX standardized everything into the late 90s, that don't work well under wine because back in their day, they would try to bypass windows by "hacking" their way to the hardware via unsupported APIs and hooks, to squeeze every bit of performance from the hardware, and also because every hardware vendor back then from graphics to sound shipped their own APIs.
- Asmod4n 7mo agoYou mean dos games, just run them under a dos emulator then.
- joe_mamba 7mo agoNO, I meant Windows games.
- ndriscoll 7mo ago90s Windows ran inside of DOS, and you can run e.g. Windows 98 games (through Windows itself) in DOSBox. Look up exowin9x where they're trying to compile all of the necessary configs for one-click launchers.
- tombert 7mo agoI didn't think that regular DOSBox had support for stuff like 3dFX does it? Or other weird APIs? I had to use PCem to get support for that stuff.
- sersi 7mo agoI've had some success with installing windows in dosbox-x which has glide support. Faster and more lightweight than pcem/86box
- tryauuum 7mo agoI tried running the elder scrolls Redguard, on wine, which launches windows version of dosbox with glide support. Redguard is a weird beast which is installed only with windows installer, but the actual game runs in dos mode Everything works but the frame rate isn't great If anyone knows a good Redguard setup for Linux please mail me, you can guess my mail easily. Now I just run the gog version
- Asmod4n 7mo agoThen you can use dosbox-x which can run any non nt windows version and has support for 3d acceleration
- tombert 7mo agoOh, no, before everything kind of converged to OpenGL and DirectX, there were oodles of different things trying to be the next graphics API. There are the more obvious ones like 3DFX/Glide, but there was also stuff like the Diamond Edge 3D, which used Sega Saturn style "quads".
- vbezhenar 7mo ago> Games are mostly just doing their own thing, only interacting with the system for input & output. They should be trivial to port then, no?
- Rohansi 7mo agoYes, they are easy to port a lot of the time. Especially now because you can use DXVK to translate DirectX calls into Vulkan, so you don't need to write a Vulkan renderer. Input is sometimes a trickier one to deal with but a lot of the time games are using cross-platform libraries for that already! Despite all this the Unity engine has spotty Linux support. Some games run better under Wine vs. Unity's native Linux builds. It's Vulkan renderer has had a memory leak for a while now. Input has randomly decided to double keypresses on some distros.
- MindSpunk 7mo agoThe hard part of Linux ports isn't the first 90% (Using the Linux APIs). It's the second 90%. Platform bugs, build issues, distro differences, implicitly relying on behavior of Windows. It's not just "use Linux API", there's a lot of effort to ship properly. Lots of effort for a tiny user base. There's more users now, but proton is probably a better target than native Linux for games.
- simonask 7mo agoIt’s not really about OS differences - as the GP said, games don’t typically use a lot of OS features. What they do tend to really put a strain on is GPU drivers. Many games and engines have workarounds and optimizations for specific vendors, and even driver versions. If the GPU driver on Linux differs in behavior from the Windows version (and it is very, very difficult to port a driver in a way that doesn’t), those workarounds can become sources of bugs.
- p1necone 7mo agoYeah but Windows is a more stable api to develop against than Linux (at least when it comes to stuff that games need to do) - it doesn't feel "pure", but pragmatically it's much better as a game developer to just make sure the Windows version works with proton than it is to develop a native Linux version that's liable to break the second you stop maintaining it.
- RajT88 7mo agoParts of the OS were designed for Office. (Windows installer service, for example)
- nicoburns 7mo agoOffice used to work well on WINE. It was the switch to a rolling release model that killed it.
- usrusr 7mo agoSo that's what's keeping Microsoft from just running WINE on an MS-flavored Linux or perhaps a clean slate kernel as their next OS. I've been wondering for a while, this is by far the best explanation.
- bombcar 7mo agoThe Windows Kernel (and arguably the Windows APIs) are the only good part of Windows; they should dump everything else and run Linux above it; wait they did do that and then changed it to a boring VM.
- fock 7mo agoif you rip out linux from your linux distribution you usually end up with GNU.
- rowyourboat 7mo agoSo, that would make this GNU/Windows
- dkersten 7mo agoThey could brand it as “New Windows”
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 7mo agoOut with the old, in with the GNU.
- dfe 6mo agoI was disappointed when Microsoft dropped original WSL. I'll admit I wasn't a Windows user at the time, nor since for that matter. But I had been before. I knew the history of the "Windows Services for UNIX" and thought that it was incredibly interesting to have the Windows kernel, full driver support, NTFS, and the ability to just use Windows normally, but also be able to just do UNIX-type stuff more or less normally. Which is what I've been doing on my Mac since the early 2000s. Then Microsoft had to make Windows a complete shit-show. Not like it hasn't happened before, but they really got themselves in deep this time.
- da_chicken 7mo agoYeah, people forget that MS Office, and Excel and Outlook in particular, are the real foundation of Microsoft's vendor lock-in on the desktop.
- Discordian93 7mo agoOutlook is now basically an Electron app, they've deprecated the old desktop Outlook in favor of a port of the web app to desktop, so it's basically just Excel remaining.
- johnebgd 7mo agoElectron apps also basically don’t work in Wine. I miss having Evernote on Linux.
- Grisu_FTP 7mo agoWouldnt it be possible to extract the files you need and sort of "repackage" it for linux? I have no idea how electron apps look "internally" but it doesnt sound too bad. Sort of like you can unzip .deb files and use them somewhere else, if what i heard was correct (never tried it myself)
- ifwinterco 7mo agoNot my area of expertise so I could be wrong but Electron apps just use Chromium underneath (which already works on linux), so in theory it should be easier to get them running on linux than a native Windows app
- jitl 7mo agoIf the Electron app is pure JS with no native extensions it can be doable. However, many Electron apps contain platform-specific js code, since features for stuff like Dock on Mac and Taskbar icons on Windows differ. Electron apps like Notion also contain native extensions - compiled C/C++/Objective-C code that are platform specific. For example in Notion, we use sqlite via better-sqlite3 (potentially replaceable since it’s open source, but will need more work than “just” repackaging js), but we also write our own native support libraries to use OS-specific APIs for microphone recording in meeting notes feature.
- badpun 7mo agoFor games, part of that mere „output” is 3d graphics, so replicating the internals of Direct 3D exactly right and getting the Linux GPU drivers to cooperate. That’s a hardcore task.
- coldpie 7mo agoFun fact: MS Office also uses Direct3D :) See "Graphics" requirement here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/system-requirements/office-suites-for-enterprise-business-education-and-government https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/system-requiremen... We put a ton of effort into D3D11 specifically to get MS Office running.
- philipwhiuk 7mo agoI don't know that they are. It's just there's more incentive to port stuff that has no direct alternative.
- codebje 7mo agoSteam and CodeWeavers contribute a lot of code to the Wine project, because it underpins their business models of supporting Windows games on non-Windows platforms. Between them they make up the vast bulk of what actually gets attention and improvement in Wine, and neither one has any interest in supporting non-game applications.
- YokoZar 7mo ago> neither one has any interest in supporting non-game applications. I don't know how much of their business it is today, but CodeWeavers spent their first decade or so supporting only non-game applications. Their product Crossover was originally Crossover Office because it was optimized around productivity applications.
- Grisu_FTP 7mo agoAlso a big part of the marketing for the SteamMachine/SteamDeck/SteamFrame is that it has a desktop mode and can be used like a pc, so i think they also have an interest in that
- jitl 7mo agoi didn’t buy a steam deck since so i can run Microsoft Office. i like that there’s freedom to open up desktop mode to tinker / install 3rd party software, but not to use it as a business machine.
- Grisu_FTP 6mo agoI just talked about using it on Desktop mode like a PC. I never said anything about doing business on it or using it as your Work PC. Even the announcement "trailer" of the steammachine showed it getting used on a Computer monitor with mouse and keyboard in desktop mode. They even said they want to improve the "Desktop mode only" experience iirc and for there more apps than just games are important. And i personally probably wouldnt have bought a steamdeck if it wasnt possible to just go into desktop mode and do whatever.
- josh_p 7mo agoI find it difficult to believe that someone with enough technical knowledge to run a Linux desktop for business purposes in 2026 would be reliant on the MS Office suite. Other people have given plenty of technical reasons for the difficulty. I don't think it’s a useful goal to get them running when practical alternatives like libreoffice exist.
- NetMageSCW 6mo agoLibreoffice isn’t a practical alternative if your are an Excel or Word power user.
- saidnooneever 7mo agothese apps are all like web browsers, and likely needlessly complicated due to patching the same codebase for so long. its MS afterall. there will be code in there that they themselves hardly understand.
- kelvinjps10 6mo agoAlthough running Microsoft web apps are getting better.
- anon291 6mo agoGames really only usually rely on standardized libraries and APIs, whereas application software relies on system libraries to do things like paint their UI.