Office365 Flake - Run Microsoft 365 on Linux via Wine without virtualization
Show HN: Microsoft Office running with Wine on Linux with no virtualization
Office365 Flake is a set of Nix Flakes and scripts that finally get Microsoft 365 (click-to-run Office) running on Linux without a virtual machine. Instead of stock Wine, it leverages umu-launcher with GE-Proton or Bottles' ProtoSoda Wine core, applying a series of clever shims and registry tweaks to overcome Wine's missing Windows APIs. You can install Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more with a single command, and even sign in with a personal Microsoft account. It's a best-effort, open-source solution for anyone who needs Office on Linux natively.
Microsoft 365 famously does not work on stock Wine. This flake is a best-effort attempt to run it through umu-launcher with GE-Proton instead.
- pluc
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.
- farseer
I feel like the entire world needs to take a plunge towards LibreOffice for the good of all.
- overclock-api
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.
- rkagerer
That's ok, I still prefer Word 2003 to the bloated, web-wired, ribbon-infested garbage that came after.
- alright2565
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.