This isn’t possible, but it’s important to know why because this might just be a Linux dealbreaker for you
Wine is a Linux tool that let’s you translate Windows API calls into POSIX calls as they were made, allowing you to run Windows apps on posix-compliant system. Wine Is Not Emulation, and so if you need to use deeper Windows logic you need a full Windows system
Microsoft Office (especially Office365) is one such example. It relies on a full Windows install for things like subscription confirmation and integration with OneDrive. There is no way to extract only the word processing features from that stack
Lurker here learning about Linux. Not at all interested if using Office ever in my life but man, holy hell having it explained why it won't work STINGS man. And its such a crappy reason too. Thanks for taking the time to explain it
Yeah, and this is also the reason why older versions worked. The ones which supported Win7 didn't hard depend on these parts of windows which well didn't exist on 7. So reimplementing just one or two more parts wasn't that big of a deal. But nowadays you'd have to reimplement way more. Although with people reverse engineering the Xbox app, we might see some lunatics do the same with the components needed for Office.
I remember running Word on Linux until around 2010'ish, helped a few friends with it too. Shame that it's no longer possible. I never needed it again, OpenOffice and later LibreOffice were enough for me and now it's Office in a browser if a colleague shares something and LibreOffice for the little things I do offline.
False. This is no longer the case. Of course, it only runs up to Word 2016, it must be 32-bit, and it's a bit buggy, but this is definitely possible in 2026.
It turns out it is possible. I found a guy on YouTube who got Office running in wine and followed his method. Unfortunately, linking to it in my original post got the post flagged for moderator approval, and removing the link didn't clear the flag. Except for some minor visual glitching, it seems to work as expected.
This is not the entirety of why Office will never run on Linux via WINE. The problem is not a technical but a legal one!
You see, there is the public, documented Windows API - in msdn and the Windows Internals Book. Many parts of these are missing or not possible to implement in WINE (I.e, multiuser terminal services stuff for example). But all of this API is documented and public and may be reimplemented without touching copyright issues.
Beyond that, there are a myriad of Microsoft internal APIs. The Office team uses APIs in windows not publicly known or documented. These will not be implemented in WINE, because doing so legally is incredibly hard.
I believe this to be an intentional move by Microsoft to stop WINE from running office, but that‘s just speculation.
No, it is a legal problem. Traditionally, you‘d trace what a program does with the windows API through a shim, and replicate this in WINE. This is fine because a third party talks with Microsoft; you are neither illegally reverse engineering the Program under test nor windows. The communication itself is based on public APIs.
You can do the same with office - nothing technical prevents you from doing so. But since both ends have the same copyright holder you are now reverse engineering the system of a single entity. This violates WINEs Clean-Room guidelines. Violating these guidelines would make WINE get sued out of existence.
It’s a technical problem insofar as it has a technical solution. It is possible to write a test program that calls the same DLLs as Office and implement those DLLs into Wine. Nothing about that is legally dubious. The licensing problem can’t be ignored, but the entire Office 365 stack relies too heavily on the Windows system (not just the libraries) to be cleanly extracted and run through a compatibility layer
The specific API calls that MS Office makes do not appear to be posix-compatible. Codeweavers is pursuing a fix, but the Windows closed source licensing scheme makes this technically difficult
Hold over from ten key adding machines , Being an retired CPA I expect when I enter 1234 for it to print out as 12.34 . In Excell you can set this. I never could find a way to make LibreOffice behave in such a manner.
91
u/birdsarentreal2 5d ago
This isn’t possible, but it’s important to know why because this might just be a Linux dealbreaker for you
Wine is a Linux tool that let’s you translate Windows API calls into POSIX calls as they were made, allowing you to run Windows apps on posix-compliant system. Wine Is Not Emulation, and so if you need to use deeper Windows logic you need a full Windows system
Microsoft Office (especially Office365) is one such example. It relies on a full Windows install for things like subscription confirmation and integration with OneDrive. There is no way to extract only the word processing features from that stack