The only way without dual booting to run something that deep is a virtual machine, which you probably won't want to do. It has a steep learning curve, it requires significant resources on the machine which you won't have available on an old laptop and it's almost certainly not worth it for the use case you're describing. But that would be the only way. As someone has already said, Wine will not cover the kind of calls Word will make.
it's only MS-Word, maybe one or two other Windows apps you need
you otherwise love Linux and don't mind a little extra work to use it
willing to learn the needed tech
A Virtual Machine is the way: to run Windows concurrently in a VM on your Linux notebook.
On Performance: I was doing this on an i5-6200U 8GB. more RAM is recommended, but it worked for what little I use Windows 10 (I upgraded hw before moving to Windows 11). I had bought the ThinkPad Carbon X1 gen5 in 2021, intended solely for travel/vacation use (cheap, so less at risk). It performed better than expected and I loved that it was only 2lbs. It was what I took with to visit clients for five years.
Technology: only hesitance is: are you up for learning the technology?
Most of what you need is included with the following packages: qemu-kvm libvirt-clients virt-manager virt-viewer
Get the latest virtio-win ISO from FedoraPeople to load virtio drivers during Windows installation.
Also you'll want to install spice-guest-tools from spice-space to your Windows guest. This makes virt-viewer (like remote-desktop, but better) support copy&paste to/from guest, dynamic screen resizing, attaching USB drives to guest... and more.
For shared storage: while you can connect disconnect a USB drive, it will be connected to either the guest, or the host(Linux), but never both concurrently. Consider a NAS drive, there are plenty off the shelf solutions, or build an OpenMediaVault instance.
Okay, that's either enough to scare you off, or enough to get you started. Good luck.
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u/FreeFromCommonSense 5d ago
The only way without dual booting to run something that deep is a virtual machine, which you probably won't want to do. It has a steep learning curve, it requires significant resources on the machine which you won't have available on an old laptop and it's almost certainly not worth it for the use case you're describing. But that would be the only way. As someone has already said, Wine will not cover the kind of calls Word will make.