Microsoft Office running with Wine on Linux with no virtualization

Details

External ID

49746401

Source

HN

Company

—

Product

Microsoft Office running with Wine on Linux with no virtualization

Website domain

github.com

Launched

Sept. 17, 2026

Cohort

—

Upvotes

94

Upvotes percentile

0.9186602870813397

Tags

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Fetched at

Sept. 21, 2026, 5:02 p.m.

Updated at

Sept. 21, 2026, 5:02 p.m.

Description

Microsoft Office famously hasn't worked well with Wine since Office 2007. There are lots of solutions out there to work around this, but all of them involve fairly heavy virtualization.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.

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