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

6 points by tombert 18d ago

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 18d ago
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 18d ago
  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 17d ago
    > 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 17d ago
      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 18d ago
I feel like the entire world needs to take a plunge towards LibreOffice for the good of all.
- cyanydeez 17d ago
  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 17d ago
  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.
  - passthejoe 17d ago
    Today's generation of kids is using Google Apps in school and has no ties to MS Office. SAAS in general will make MS Office much less relevant. Things like Canva and Photopea are doing the same to Adobe.
    - tombert 17d ago
      Sure; honestly this is just for people like my parents. I am slowly trying to build the case that they should switch to Linux, especially if they expect me to play IT for them.
- Daviey 17d ago
  The biggest blocker for me is having confidence my output renders the same with people using MS Office, pdf output isn't always sufficient.
sid_ships 18d ago
[flagged]
alright2565 17d ago
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 17d ago
  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.
  - aroman 17d ago
    nix + LLMs is the most fun I've had with personal computing since I burned an Ubuntu live CD in middle school
    - tombert 17d ago
      Same. I've had a lot of good luck getting Claude to make Flakes and then adding it to my Jovian Steam console to play it; it allows me to even pre-set stuff like mappings for my Xbox controller. https://hub.brucewillis.sexy/~tombert/game-flakes/sources https://hub.brucewillis.sexy/~tombert/game-flakes/sources (I promise, safe for work, despite the URL).
jmkni 17d ago
What version of Office are we talking about?
- tombert 17d ago
  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 17d ago
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.
- milgrum 17d ago
  probably the support burden, plus they already have o365 web apps that work on linux. office breaks in new and exciting ways on windows all the time, and they have full control over that. I <3 linux but I never want to support wine office in an enterprise environment, sounds like a total nightmare
- tiahura 17d ago
  Because they want to phase out the windows apps too.
robinpie 17d ago
Awesome!
TiredOfLife 17d ago
The bottles project https://x.com/brombinmirko https://x.com/brombinmirko also has been progressing with alpha being promised "soon"
- tombert 17d ago
  Interesting, I hadn't heard of this actually, though it looks like there's a good chunk of overlap in what we were doing. I suspect what they're doing is better than what I did. I just was happy I got something working and wanted to share.
rkagerer 17d ago
That's ok, I still prefer Word 2003 to the bloated, web-wired, ribbon-infested garbage that came after. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47202540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47202540
- tombert 17d ago
  Yeah, I think I mentioned it here a few months ago, but I got Office 97 working with Wine, and I was sort of flabbergasted at how usable it still is. It worked fine with my system's TrueType fonts, it does all the formatting I care about, and given that it's nearly 30 year old software it runs obscenely fast. If I weren't a grumpy die-hard CLI person I would probably still consider using it. All that said, there are a lot of people who want the absolute latest MS Office. I don't get it either.
- mahboi 17d ago
  I'm glad this is still a complaint. I used Office 2004 (same as 03) until 2013, when I absolutely couldn't anymore because of docx incompatibility. My wife still uses 07, sadly it's ribboned.
  - creshal 17d ago
    doc vs docx is whatever, what kills older offices for me is the 64k row/col limit in excel. That was only fixed with the ribboned versions. :(
  - rkagerer 17d ago
    Do you have the docx compatibility pack installed?
    - mahboi 16d ago
      They didn't have that for Mac. Oh and turns out Word '04 was Mac-only, '03 was the last Windows version without the ribbon.
Kwpolska 17d ago
Show HN is for things you made, not things where all commits are made by Claude.
- aroman 17d ago
  Shall we also ban projects that are not authored directly in bytecode? Surely it's not really "made by hand" if you used a higher level interpreted language. But seriously: software engineering is all about leveraging abstractions/indirection where appropriate for the job to be done. It's kind of... the whole point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_software_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_softwar...
- tombert 17d ago
  To be fair, I actually emailed HN moderation before I submitted this because I actually sort of agree. They said I should go ahead and submit it because there might be some interest in this.
  - mahboi 17d ago
    That's solid
- drnick1 17d ago
  Yes, sure, let's pretend we are back in 1995 and write C by hand on a beige Pentium tower.
- qwerpy 17d ago
  Disagree, if it provides value to me I don’t care who or what built it. This provides value to me. I’m stuck on windows and eventually want to get out, and MS Office (specifically OneNote) is one of the remaining hurdles. This gives me hope that it’s only a matter of time. For the anti-AI people they can wait for someone can do a "proper", artisanal human-written version that builds on the problems that were solved by the AI-written version here.
pluc 17d ago
It's cool to see things that were entirely unnecessary popping up with the help of AI. Nobody ever cared enough to do this, nobody is going to use this, but now we can just shit it out knowing full well nobody is going to care. Just had to sacrifice humanity's knowledge and a few professions to get there.
- tombert 17d ago
  Uh, what? I actually think a lot of people cared enough to do this; the entire Wine project sort of exists specifically because people want Windows software on Linux. I know multiple people who have said that they won't use Linux specifically because it doesn't have the full-fat desktop version Office on there. "Unnecessary"? Sure, I guess, I don't like MS Office and I don't use it, but a lot of people seem to really like it, whether or not they should.
  - pluc 17d ago
    I'm not talking about WINE, I'm talking avout what you had Claude build to use it. If this were a proof of concept and you had the ability to say what you did different to make it work better than previous attempts that would be great, but i don't think you know.
    - tombert 17d ago
      The stuff that was done differently was the shim to get the activation working, and the fact that modern Wine has native Wayland support that helps avoid a lot of graphical glitches. I'm not entirely sure what your point is though? Are you suggesting I don't know how to write software? I've been doing this for a very long time, well before generative AI.
- cyberax 17d ago
  Is anything YOU do useful? This is a very useful project for me, because I occasionally need real Excel.
- mahboi 17d ago
deleted 17d ago
[deleted]
tiahura 17d ago
Bravo! Beat me. Been working on this for a bit.
- tombert 17d ago
  I mean, all I did was use a large chunk of free time and Fable tokens. I wish I could say that my big brain and software engineering prowess is what got it working, but mostly it was just staring at text and not having anything better to do.
28304283409234 17d ago
Ok but why. Why on earth would i want to run microsoft office in 2026?
- tombert 17d ago
  I'm with you. You're not my parents.

6 points by tombert 18d ago

overclock-api 18d ago

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 18d ago
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 17d ago
  > 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 17d ago
    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 18d ago

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

cyanydeez 17d ago
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 17d ago
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.
- passthejoe 17d ago
  Today's generation of kids is using Google Apps in school and has no ties to MS Office. SAAS in general will make MS Office much less relevant. Things like Canva and Photopea are doing the same to Adobe.
  - tombert 17d ago
    Sure; honestly this is just for people like my parents. I am slowly trying to build the case that they should switch to Linux, especially if they expect me to play IT for them.
Daviey 17d ago
The biggest blocker for me is having confidence my output renders the same with people using MS Office, pdf output isn't always sufficient.

sid_ships 18d ago

[flagged]

alright2565 17d ago

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 17d ago
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.
- aroman 17d ago
  nix + LLMs is the most fun I've had with personal computing since I burned an Ubuntu live CD in middle school
  - tombert 17d ago
    Same. I've had a lot of good luck getting Claude to make Flakes and then adding it to my Jovian Steam console to play it; it allows me to even pre-set stuff like mappings for my Xbox controller. https://hub.brucewillis.sexy/~tombert/game-flakes/sources https://hub.brucewillis.sexy/~tombert/game-flakes/sources (I promise, safe for work, despite the URL).

jmkni 17d ago

What version of Office are we talking about?

tombert 17d ago
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 17d ago

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.

milgrum 17d ago
probably the support burden, plus they already have o365 web apps that work on linux. office breaks in new and exciting ways on windows all the time, and they have full control over that. I <3 linux but I never want to support wine office in an enterprise environment, sounds like a total nightmare
tiahura 17d ago
Because they want to phase out the windows apps too.

robinpie 17d ago

Awesome!

TiredOfLife 17d ago

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

tombert 17d ago
Interesting, I hadn't heard of this actually, though it looks like there's a good chunk of overlap in what we were doing. I suspect what they're doing is better than what I did. I just was happy I got something working and wanted to share.

rkagerer 17d ago

That's ok, I still prefer Word 2003 to the bloated, web-wired, ribbon-infested garbage that came after. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47202540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47202540

tombert 17d ago
Yeah, I think I mentioned it here a few months ago, but I got Office 97 working with Wine, and I was sort of flabbergasted at how usable it still is. It worked fine with my system's TrueType fonts, it does all the formatting I care about, and given that it's nearly 30 year old software it runs obscenely fast. If I weren't a grumpy die-hard CLI person I would probably still consider using it. All that said, there are a lot of people who want the absolute latest MS Office. I don't get it either.
mahboi 17d ago
I'm glad this is still a complaint. I used Office 2004 (same as 03) until 2013, when I absolutely couldn't anymore because of docx incompatibility. My wife still uses 07, sadly it's ribboned.
- creshal 17d ago
  doc vs docx is whatever, what kills older offices for me is the 64k row/col limit in excel. That was only fixed with the ribboned versions. :(
- rkagerer 17d ago
  Do you have the docx compatibility pack installed?
  - mahboi 16d ago
    They didn't have that for Mac. Oh and turns out Word '04 was Mac-only, '03 was the last Windows version without the ribbon.

Kwpolska 17d ago

Show HN is for things you made, not things where all commits are made by Claude.

aroman 17d ago
Shall we also ban projects that are not authored directly in bytecode? Surely it's not really "made by hand" if you used a higher level interpreted language. But seriously: software engineering is all about leveraging abstractions/indirection where appropriate for the job to be done. It's kind of... the whole point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_software_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_softwar...
tombert 17d ago
To be fair, I actually emailed HN moderation before I submitted this because I actually sort of agree. They said I should go ahead and submit it because there might be some interest in this.
- mahboi 17d ago
  That's solid
drnick1 17d ago
Yes, sure, let's pretend we are back in 1995 and write C by hand on a beige Pentium tower.
qwerpy 17d ago
Disagree, if it provides value to me I don’t care who or what built it. This provides value to me. I’m stuck on windows and eventually want to get out, and MS Office (specifically OneNote) is one of the remaining hurdles. This gives me hope that it’s only a matter of time. For the anti-AI people they can wait for someone can do a "proper", artisanal human-written version that builds on the problems that were solved by the AI-written version here.

pluc 17d ago

It's cool to see things that were entirely unnecessary popping up with the help of AI. Nobody ever cared enough to do this, nobody is going to use this, but now we can just shit it out knowing full well nobody is going to care. Just had to sacrifice humanity's knowledge and a few professions to get there.

tombert 17d ago
Uh, what? I actually think a lot of people cared enough to do this; the entire Wine project sort of exists specifically because people want Windows software on Linux. I know multiple people who have said that they won't use Linux specifically because it doesn't have the full-fat desktop version Office on there. "Unnecessary"? Sure, I guess, I don't like MS Office and I don't use it, but a lot of people seem to really like it, whether or not they should.
- pluc 17d ago
  I'm not talking about WINE, I'm talking avout what you had Claude build to use it. If this were a proof of concept and you had the ability to say what you did different to make it work better than previous attempts that would be great, but i don't think you know.
  - tombert 17d ago
    The stuff that was done differently was the shim to get the activation working, and the fact that modern Wine has native Wayland support that helps avoid a lot of graphical glitches. I'm not entirely sure what your point is though? Are you suggesting I don't know how to write software? I've been doing this for a very long time, well before generative AI.
cyberax 17d ago
Is anything YOU do useful? This is a very useful project for me, because I occasionally need real Excel.
mahboi 17d ago

deleted 17d ago

[deleted]

tiahura 17d ago

Bravo! Beat me. Been working on this for a bit.

tombert 17d ago
I mean, all I did was use a large chunk of free time and Fable tokens. I wish I could say that my big brain and software engineering prowess is what got it working, but mostly it was just staring at text and not having anything better to do.

28304283409234 17d ago

Ok but why. Why on earth would i want to run microsoft office in 2026?

tombert 17d ago
I'm with you. You're not my parents.