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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.
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.
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.
? Sway is a Wayland compositor
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.
I feel like the entire world needs to take a plunge towards LibreOffice for the good of all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The biggest blocker for me is having confidence my output renders the same with people using MS Office, pdf output isn't always sufficient.
That has been a lot less of a problem lately. Why not try again and open a bug report if there's an issue?
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.
All very well for an open source software project but for software you’re using day to day to achieve other, business central, goals, it’s a lot of lost time with little benefit.
...you should use something which is reliable, no more complicated than needed for the purpose, which assures documents made now can be read in the distant future, keeps your confidential information out of the wrong hands and which is sure to be available to anyone who needs to have access to it.
Doesn't really sound like Microsoft Office is a good fit if you ask me.
You want to use the same stuff your clients use, that’s guaranteed to look the same on their computer. So Office it is.
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.
When is a PDF not sufficient? I write all my reports/letters in LaTeX and if someone complained about receiving a PDF, I would send them the source and wish them good luck.
That is actually why I got into LaTeX in the first place!
My resume was initially done with LibreOffice and I'd send recruiters a PDF, and they would ask for a .docx, and when I would send that they would screw up all the formatting by inserting their ugly logo on the top.
When I "ported" my resume over to LaTeX, I would send the PDF and they'd ask for a .docx, I would say "Oh, the resume is done in LaTeX. Here's a link to the source and instructions on how to compile it, feel free to do what you need".
Then they would just submit the raw PDF.
When I need other people to continue editing it.
I also prefer LaTeX, I've written hundreds of letters, multiple papers, a few thesis and my CV (maintained for the last ~20 years). But the defacto for business documents sadly isn't LaTeX.
The network effect of social media has nothing on the network effect of ms office
You can try to use LibreOffice all you want, until you receive a form to fill where LibreOffice doesn't display checkboxes and recipient won't accept "x", because their automated software only uses MS Office and won't properly attribute it to questions.
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.
With such an advancement of AI, can't parity be vibe coded?
That would require LibreOffice not being shit.
I can't tell what's going on with all the LibreOffice drama and whether it's a zombie on life support after the professional community management class kicked all the actual developers out (my take away).
Can you elaborate more on this? This is the first time I'm hearing about it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47599305
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47652324
I avoid both like the plague. These apps make me feel less productive and the docs they produce always look ugly to me. I would rather md, html or latex.
The word editor isn't really Microsoft's product, it's just one of the many entry points to the Microsoft Office cloud sphere where all the data can be interconnected and shareable.
For starters, universities and government offices should not expect a proprietary format. Everyone should accept OpenDocument Format (ODF) or a similar FOSS format. MS Office, LibreOffice, OpenOffice and whatnot can compete in editing and rendering open formats.
Come to think of it, this is a good proposal for EU, thanks for the USB-C, by the way :)
Can't speak for every graduate program or every school, but when I was in grad school at University of York, we actually used Overleaf with LaTeX a lot, since it allowed shared collaborative editing.
I liked that because it's still an open format.
The problem with this is Microsoft foresaw it and pushed (bribed?) OOXML through ISO and now there's no standing on "forcing" an open standard without OOXML being one.
how about requiring the format to actually be specified? Isn't ooxml filled with tons of chunks saying "and then this will behave like word 95 did" and not specify what tat is
I think LibreOffice is an outdated and overall awful piece of software. It's not like Open Source champions like Linux, Blender and Godot at all.
Its only advantage is being Free. This product couldn't survive in the market if it was paid, arguably at any price. I really tried it to use and love it, but LibreOffice is just terrible.
OpenOffice is older and outdated compared to Libre, which did you try?
Both. Neither is a viable mass-market alternative in my opinion. Cross-platform office software is just a difficult problem. I think they could be appropriate for some nonprofit/government work, which I think is where they do well today.
Try onlyoffice
What modern features are you looking for in a say, document editor? My experience with LibreOffice Writer and Calc has been excellent. I'm happy there is no modern AI or cloud integration noise or ribbon bars with excessive whitespaces.
Except that Microsoft Office is just better.
But with the awesome job Microsoft does at breaking it, maybe in a few years, LibreOffice will be a good alternative, if the LibreOffice guys don't screw up too much on their side.
Realistically, the world is just gonna AI-plow their way through old moats like this. Don't know about new ones.
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.
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.
nix + LLMs is the most fun I've had with personal computing since I burned an Ubuntu live CD in middle school
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 (I promise, safe for work, despite the URL).
What version of Office are we talking about?
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.
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.
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
Because they want to phase out the windows apps too.
Awesome!
The bottles project https://x.com/brombinmirko also has been progressing with alpha being promised "soon"
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.
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
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.
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.
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. :(
Show HN is for things you made, not things where all commits are made by Claude.
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_softwar...
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.
That's solid
Yes, sure, let's pretend we are back in 1995 and write C by hand on a beige Pentium tower.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is anything YOU do useful?
This is a very useful project for me, because I occasionally need real Excel.
This is pretty necessary for tons of people considering Linux
Bravo! Beat me. Been working on this for a bit.
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.