Can it run recent versions of Office though? That is what would make it useful for many people, but previous versions have never been able to (I have tried!). It's the Office click-to-run installer, which has been around since Office 2016 and the only installation method since 2019, which was the problem.

Came here to ask just that. Running Word smoothly in Wine is what would make using a Linux distro on my day-to-day desktop viable for me. (And don't tell me to run LibreOffice – I like it well enough, but even 99.97% compatibility wouldn't be enough for my use case – sadly it just has to be Word or my clients will have problems sooner rather than later [formatting, comments, tracked changes, etc.].)

You have the option to run Office through the web, (with monthly subscription and an active Internet connection so they can harvest your rich creamy data.)

For a local install, get LibreOffice. Private, free and can save in Office file formats.

If running actual Word / Excel is a must, then Win 11 / 12 / 13 / 14 ad nauseum is your life until your final logoff and you are stuck in the MS hamster wheel.

The web versions of Office are shit compared to the installed ones, and the files need to be saved to Microsoft's cloudy storage.

It's really bizarre the way the Linux faithful seem to almost take offence that anyone might need to run MS Office, and downvote anyone pointing this out. Will they ever come to understand that not everyone lives in their bubble and business realities dictate what software some people need to run?

And Libre Office is not an adequate substitute if sharing complex documents / spreadsheets - there are too many circumstances where full compatibility cannot be guaranteed. The post to which the one above was responding even specifically pointed this out but was clearly ignored.

microsoft, and maybe your clients, are the problem here, not linux or its fanboys.

"The post to which the one above was responding even specifically pointed this out but was clearly ignored."

It wasn't ignored, the reply stated that you're stuck on the ms hamster wheel.

The free software people aren't going to all this trouble to create ms compatibility, then stopping 1 inch short of the end just to be cunts. That last 1 inch is clearly very difficult / impossible. Whose fault do you think that is?

How much have you paid for linux? I have my frustrations with linux, but I've paid nothing for any of it, so I just have to live with it as it is, and occasionally let off a bit of steam here.

The free software people aren't going to all this trouble to create ms compatibility, then stopping 1 inch short of the end just to be

It is not simply a matter of compatibility. Equation editing is not compatible between MS Word and LibreOffice, for whatever reason, but is also far, far better in Word, not least because you can enter LaTeX. Of course LaTeX itself is better still.

LibreOffice is more compatible with Word, than Word 365 is compatible with Word.

From bitter experience ... trying to edit documents with equations in them on both LibreOffice and MS Office Just Does Not Work. And Office 365 doesn't offer equation editing at all. For that reason alone I had to get a Windows laptop from $FORMER_WORKPLACE alas.

Any company running "Excel databases" dreads updating to modern versions of Office anyway.

Using excel as a database seems even more of a weird way to have done something when MS Office business editions (even the small business one) came with Access, which despite being....well.....sub optimal was still an actual database and not a spreadsheet being misused.

I'm reminded of this (obligatory) XKCD webcomic

https://xkcd.com/763/

Access seems to be pretty much abandonware at this point though.

If WINE can run games seamlessly, then most other Windows applications will work as well, because gaming represents the most complex and demanding side of Windows computing. PC gaming is uniquely challenging on Linux since the ecosystem was built around Windows from the ground up: DirectX is Windows-only and must be translated through compatibility layers, many multiplayer titles rely on Windows-first anti-cheat systems that block or ignore Linux entirely, and GPU drivers—especially for new hardware and features—are typically optimized for Windows first, with Linux support arriving later or with compromises.

Nail gaming on Linux and the rest falls into line (barring active measures to block you from the OS vendors, of course.)

I swapped over maybe six months ago to Bazzite.

I haven't run into any Steam games that have outright failed yet...but to be fair I have not gone through my whole library to test each. Some are pretty intensive and work just like they did on Windows 10 (or better as I used to have to shut of real time scanning from Defender to prevent stuttering)

I run Heroic for my Epic games library and all of those work so far but once again I have not ground through the library to check them all.

I run the EA App through Bottles and it works fine for the old games I actually own on there including an old BF game.

Blizzard is supposed to work in Bottles but I have not had luck with that, so I installed their app under Steam and it works great for all my games.

If your game runs Vulkan I find it will run way better than DX11 or 12.

Kernel level anti-cheat has no place on any computer I own, though others don't care so that is definitely a nope for functionality on Linux.

Office productivity etc. is still a gap for sure.

I don't run MS Office anymore and have lived with the online versions for my customers which is navigable but not as full featured as local clients like you mentioned. I would hazard they should work under Bottles or one of the other translators?

DaVinci Resolve is one I hear mentioned a lot, they had a Linux version but there are issues with the licensed formats, encoders etc. and the Windows version will not emulate yet.

Adobe has a quite a few products are also problematic (at least from what I hear)

The only current workarounds for those is a VM or moving to a similarish Linux based app. which means re-learning from scratch something you have been doing your whole career in some cases.

Anyway, for me its fine but there are definitely a lot of gaps from just walking away from your Windows install.

In my experience: Windows chews RAM, Linux chews CPU.

I honestly thought I would miss Windows a lot more since I have been using it for a very very long time.

In fact I still have my Windows 10 partition "just in case", but I have resisted so far and will for a while since I don't want to spend half my day patching it haha.

TLDR - Works for a lot of games barring ones with kernel anti-cheat. Works ok for basic office productivity, with MS Office online being a work around. Works not so well for big vendor creative applications. Its not as bad as I thought it would be.

Crossover seems to be able to run Office 2016, at least:

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/08/crossover-25-1-0-released-office-gaming-fixes

https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover#linux

IrfanView was the very first application I ran under WINE, back in 1999(?)

I remember only being able to run Notepad in very old versions of Wine without problems, we have come a long way.

That part of the subheading should begin with "and" as it's a pro, not a con.

I imagine Microsoft has kept a wary eye on Wine since Wine's inception.

Presumably, try as they might, Microsoft's lawyers cannot devise credible arguments that Wine infringes Microsoft 'rights' under copyright, patent, or trademark law; that despite the USA being the global hub for rentier economics. Even if they could sustain an argument in court, the enforcement of a restrictive ruling globally would be nigh on impossible. However, at present, Wine offers a negligible threat to Microsoft's hegemony in the business and educational markets.

Recent versions of Wine have become more simple to deploy, and they produce timely and trustworthy output. Seamlessly, they enable the use of many gargantuan (bloated?) software suites. Given the number of trustworthy suppliers of unfettered software, buccaneers have plenty to fill gaps in Linux provision. Also, even should a Windows program be stuffed with 'nasties', prudent Linux users easily circumvent them.

As for 'Microsoft Store', who needs it when unofficial sources for such components as are deemed worth having abound?

If MS really, really wanted it could engineer apps like Office to fail miserably when they detect wine running.

but so far, they don't and long may that remain. They (MS) seem to be hell bent on adding AI to everything even if it does not need it.

The more 'Donald Trump Fingers' that can be given to MS the better in my mind.

You cannot run any recent versions of MS Office under Wine, so far as I am aware (with the caveat that I've not tested with the most recent version of Wine)..

Last time I looked, it couldn't run anything later than Office 2003. It seems to have improved slightly since then, but nevertheless, you will be better off running LibreOffice than any of the versions of MS Office that Wine can cope with, even if LibreOffice can't replace the latest versions of MS Office.

I would assume that Microsoft's response is that "Office™ isn't done until Wine doesn't run (it)".

[1]In some of my code, I've checked to see if if it was running under Wine so that it could behave differently. Usually, as in the linked example, it's because there's some bits or bobs of the Win32 API that don't work identically in Wine and "real" Windows. I'm sure that if the threat from Wine was sufficiently serious, Microsoft could fairly trivially modify their applications to break when not run on Genuine Windows®.

(I am a serious fanboy for Wine. It's saved me the effort of porting several programs to Linux or OS/X or *BSD. At most, I had to tweak them -- as above -- to duck around some limitation in Wine. And note that the above example references Wines 1.7.18 and 7.0.1; I would be surprised if many of those limitations still existed in Wine 11.)

[1] https://github.com/Bill-Gray/PDCursesMod/blob/master/wingui/pdcscrn.c#L1206

> Presumably, try as they might, Microsoft's lawyers cannot devise credible arguments that Wine infringes Microsoft 'rights' under copyright, patent, or trademark law; that despite the USA being the global hub for rentier economics

No, but they could probably try to argue that Wine allows for running programs that enable people to look at pictures of "women and children naked".

Might be enough!

Grok allows people to look at pictures of "women and children naked"...

> Presumably, try as they might, Microsoft's lawyers cannot devise credible arguments that Wine infringes Microsoft 'rights' under copyright, patent, or trademark law;

Agreed.

But then if you look at the history, WINE is a 32-bit FOSS recreation of SUN WABI:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi_(software)

https://web.archive.org/web/19990824175632/http://sun.com/solaris/wabi/%3B$sessionid$510WNTIAAV2X3AMUVFZE45UBSSUXEUDO

Caldera gave me an eval copy of WABI for Linux and it ran Office 4.3 on Caldera OpenLinux very well.

https://everythinglinux.org/wabi/index.html

Screenshots etc:

https://virtuallyfun.com/2020/11/11/fun-with-caldera-wabi/

Sun proposed formally standardising and publishing the Win16 API:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/234999.235003

It nearly happened.

Since MS-DOS was written as an independent implementation of the published DR CP/M API, it is a scary precedent for MS...

Only tested on Notepad++ so far

So did mine, and thus far I've only tested it on Calvin Tucker's Redneck: Farm Animals Racing Tournament, which worked flawlessly

Why do I find the name of that game so intriguing?

The primary requirement for Windows that I have to deal with is niche USB hardware. The manufacturer provides suitable USB device drivers, and their interface software uses the AccessDB file format (this makes it fairly simple to talk to from other software).

Does WINE support driving USB devices?

Does it support the AccessDB underpinnings (OLEDB/ODBC)?

True dat. I keep a Virtualbox Win10 image for setting up USB audio devices since 'class compliant' is a generous term...but also need an old XP laptop as that's that last time Firewire drivers were released for the ProFire 2626!

WINE is getting better all the time. Ironically, it will probably achieve perfection around the same time the Windows monopoly finally collapses and we don't need it anymore.

Wine Is No longer Essential?

WTF is that?

> Wine 11.0 Tuesday

> WTF is that?

You excerpted a sentence fragment. In full it says:

«

The Wine project delivered Wine 11.0 Tuesday

»

That means "the WINE Project delivered version 11.0 on Tuesday."

What I originally wrote was:

«

The Wine project delivered Wine 11.0 yesterday (as we write)

»

... but it didn't run until Thursday. So, it got edited, and ended up a little less clear.

In the rewrite it also gained, dare I say, an Americanism.

“Delivered [X] Tuesday” versus the (to me, at least) British construction, “delivered [x] on Tuesday”.

Why does this esteemed organ waste time and money editing perfectly good text into nonsense? Even if it must be changed to the day (not that it would make any difference within a few days), [1]American English allows for "on" for clarity before days and dates .

[1] https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/articles/do-you-use-on-with-days-and-dates/

If you really need MS Office, you should probably pay for a license and a licensed copy of Windows. If you prefer Linux then you can probably run your legit Windows on a VM.

Do MS Office fan boys see any compatibility issues between Mac and Windows versions? I seem to recall some compatibility niggles when I had no choice but to use MS Office.

For my use cases, the Office web versions, Google Docs and Libra office serve me well.

WINE is great for Adobe Digital Editions and a few other niche apps that are useful to me

"If you really need MS Office, you should probably pay for a license and a licensed copy of Windows."

I think for many it would be extra issues that Windows presents that would be the sticking point: the slurping, the intrusions of AI, the system breaking updates....

So don't use Office then. Tell your clients why you are taking that position.

> If you really need MS Office, you should probably pay for a license and a licensed copy of Windows.

Why?

The superficial unconsidered answer is "apps run better on the real OS and so it's better to run it if you can" but that falls down on deeper inspection.

There's no _legal_ requirement -- run them on whatever you can -- and if WINE works well enough, it offers 3 main categories of advantages:

[1] It integrates better: apps can see the Linux filesystem, Linux apps can access Windows files (e.g. you can open email attachments or downloads, and directly attach and send files from Windows apps); cut and paste works in both directions.

[2] There is no need for VMs, isolation, setting up comms and integration between emulated virtual environment and host; apps run at full native resolution on the native display, etc.

[3] There is no separate Windows OS in need of licensing, updates, virus protection, and other continued maintenance.

Triple win.

I use both methods, but if a given app works under WINE, that's the preferable method. It starts quicker, runs quicker, it uses _much_ less RAM and disk, and it integrates better.

I've recently been forced to use Word and Excel on a Mac (the web versions wouldn't cut it) and they're still dodgy - there's definitely minor compatibility niggles. Almost certainly deliberate by MS. They're scum, their nefarious tactics over the last 30 years make what VW did with the diesel-defeat scandal look like child's play.

Do MS Office fan boys see any compatibility issues between Mac and Windows versions? I seem to recall some compatibility niggles when I had no choice but to use MS Office.

If you have any serious questions, I suggest that you not use the gratuitous insult.

Powerquery on Excel isn't anything like as feature-complete on Mac as it is on Windows.

I know that a lot of companies still see Linux as too small a market on the desktop to warrant a native Linux port of their apps. But it would be nice if they could at least test and tweak their Windows builds to work under WINE and well as Windows. As although im no dev im sure it wouldn't be a massive amount of work to do, especially if your an large corporation with a large dev team.

Microsoft on the other hand wants to keep their cash cow of office running primarily on Windows. As if 365 ran flawlessly under WINE then the Office compatibility tie in that keeps a lot of businesses running Windows maybe broken. As businesses could save on the cost of a Windows license by just installing Linux with WINE and then use Office without having to pay for a Windows license, which is going to directly hit Microsoft profits.

The Linux boys are improving day by day, while the Windows boys are failling left and right.

Gaming has SteamOS, Wine looks very capable, and I am running out of reasons to even consider a Windows 11 setup. If I have to abandon my Windows 10, I am so jumping into the Wine tanker. As long as gaming works (GTA and the sort are known for being ill-tempered with kernel anti-cheat tools) I will gladly abandon the nonsense Windows has become.

Wine 11 is actually available on FreeBSD. It's just that the package (port) is called wine-devel.

FreeBSD has several such packages, like drm-latest-kmod (drm 6.9 instead of 6.6), mesa-devel (mesa 26 instead of 24.3 or some such), wine-geko-devel and some others.

This way, an user can have stable or a relatively more up to date OS.