Bottles' Founder Has Managed to Run Microsoft 365 on Linux
a month ago by SocialistVibes01 to c/linux
Mirko Brombin, the creator of Bottles, has got Microsoft 365 running on Linux. His posts on X showcase an installation that completes on a Windows 10 or 11 Wine prefix, signs in with his existing license, and launches at least one editor.
He achieved this using two things, an unreleased version of Soda and Bottles 67.4. If you remember, Soda is a Wine-based runner that facilitates easy running of Windows games and applications.
On first glance, what he posted might look like a developer-focused log, but these changes are the foundation of what full Microsoft 365 support via Bottles will one day hopefully look like.
The results of his work
Mirko was able to login into the MS 365 app using his credentials and was able to launch MS Word and use it. Of course that's not the only thing he got working; since two-factor authentication passed, the suite detected his license, and OneDrive integration was functional.
The memory footprint of the office suite was less than 500MB, so this should be light on your Linux system.
The build he is currently testing is 2608 (20326.20144), which he says is the last build the installer will offer for Windows 10 and 11. And before you get all hyped up, wanting to try this out on your computer, know that you will have to wait.
Soda 11.0-11 (error 404 for now) has no release yet, and the component catalog that ships with Bottles 67.4 stops at Soda 11.0-10. Even the long-standing community request for a Microsoft Office installer in Bottles is still open.
Do we need Microsoft 365 on Linux?
Till date, there's not been an official Linux desktop build of Microsoft 365, and seeing how Microsoft currently operates, I don't expect one to appear anytime soon.
What's been achieved here is remarkable. Once fully implemented, this will help draw in people into Linux, as many shudder at the thought of switching to the platform because their preferred office suite doesn't work here.
For context, CodeWeavers sells a paid Wine product, CrossOver, and its database still lists Microsoft Office 365 on Linux as "Installs, Will Not Run," last tested against CrossOver 26.3.0.
Which is why I hope the fix travels further than Bottles. Wine sits beneath every one of these projects, including Soda. So a patch that lands upstream reaches all of them at once, and you would not need a particular runner to get Office working.
M$ have specialised in anti competive malicious actions for over three decades. It's baked into their culture
Inhales the nostalgia deeply. Aaaahhh !
I'd like to hijack your comment for a quick PSA for today's lucky 10000, even though I doubt many of them hang around these parts of the web.
The compatibility issues aren't the alternative's faults. Rather, the cause is Microsoft playing dirty.
Microsoft Office silently breaks compatibility with its own self-made document format (the so-called "Open Office XML"). They made the public standard and switched to it around 2010, and yet they still sometimes just... stray from the standard.
Since most everyone uses MS Office, people's first instinct is to doubt the small player for being bad, underfunded, low quality or whatever else instead of doubting MS for playing dirty. The entire tactic reads like a slightly modified Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Ask your job to provide a device that can run the microslop software
Here's how that would go:
Envidon: I want a device that can run O365.
Job: We can certainly make that happen. Just hand in your PC to the servicedesk and they will install Windows for you.
Envidon: So I can dualboot Linux for actual work and Windows for slopwork?
Job: Hahaha, no. Linux or O365.
Hahaha, no.
Haha, I see. I wish I could use Linux as my work operating system but a separate device is as good as I can get
This might be useful for some Linux users who want (but don't need) to run Microsoft 365 occasionally, but actually relying on this kind of hack is a terrible idea.
Once fully implemented, this will help draw in people into Linux, as many shudder at the thought of switching to the platform because their preferred office suite doesn’t work here.
I certainly hope this doesn't "help draw in people into Linux". It's sad to think about people and organizations switching to Linux on the basis of someone misleading them into thinking that relying on this kind of thing is a good idea because when it breaks it will give them a bad impression and they'll blame "Linux" instead of Microsoft (or Bottles or whoever told them it was a good idea).
When the lack of a Linux version of a specific proprietary program is the blocker preventing someone from switching to Linux, relying on a workaround which remains unsupported by the proprietary/adversarial software vendor is... a recipe for a bad time.
Even if this mostly works today, it is extremely likely that (either intentionally or inadvertently) Microsoft will break it in the future.
So, although I do see how this can be useful for some people when/while it works, in my opinion Linux and the world at large would be better off if this software didn't exist. I hope Microsoft breaks it sooner than later!
👏
their preferred office suite
Usually it's not "their preferred office suite" but "office suite they are forces to use at work". MS Office usage is high because of network effect, not because any other office suite is worse.
I use LO Writer for any document I write (or work with) myself and it's perfectly fine. The only reason I keep MS Office is that I need to work on documents other people write (or need to work with).
Of course there are people who actually prefer MS Office, but it's similar to Windows itself: most people did not choose it, they either don't know there is an alternative or are forced to use it for compatibility reasons (at work). It's rare that anyone actually "prefers" MS software.
MS Excel is unfortunately still unmatched; and is literally the only reason why most people still use the MS Office suite.
It's not like I want to argue, generally curious. What does Excel do that Calc doesn't?
I work with text a lot, so I'm good with Writer (or Word), but I rarely do anything advanced in Calc or Excel, for basic stuff Calc is fine. I really don't know enough to compare the two.
I use LibreOffice at home because fuck Microsoft, but at work Excel has tables and I really miss those.
Honestly, learning things one way kind of sticks with you. I've also done a lot more ---I wouldn't say advanced--- maybe just above basic stuff in excel that I just don't want to relearn how to do it differently; like making auto-fill using a csv database, and yes I'm lazy but hey I only worked 2 hours out of an 8 hour day.
I use libre for everything else, though their spelling correction is annoying. Don't you dare use a British English spelling sigh.
I have love for LibreOffice Writer and Impress but it is nowhere near as polished as Word or PowerPoint. Used on Linux and Windows. I switched from Windows to cachyos on my work laptop. First I open Writer, I get lag when scrolling. Fix on arch wiki, cool, but still. The interface is a mess, i.e. the Paragraph Style panel doesn't scale and is pretty unusable with the tabbed Interface layout. Pinch to zoom doesn't work. Generally feels laggy and slow. Impress is also such a hassle to get shit done compared to PowerPoint, i.e. lack of good snap grids and guides.
I guess I'm the only here, but after years of running LibreOffice, I still miss MS Office.
Don't get me wrong, I can do everything I need in LO, but MSO is still better imo.
Nothing is like Excel and it's macros (I know, old school, but I can't get macros as complete in LO). And I miss Word's "page layout" where you can just center a text to a page vertically. Details, but still things I miss.
Excel is the one. They’ve tried but they can’t truly replace it.
It and perhaps Word are the two things the competition can’t really land a punch on
I’ve tried a bunch of spreadsheet programs. They are all painful to use compared to excel.
Sure, you can type up some basic calcs in LibreOffice or Numbers or whatever, but none of these could replicate the stuff I do daily for work in excel unfortunately.
That said, the lack of suitable alternatives did get me to learn Python for personal use. And that opened up a whole new world for things I do at work too. Things that would have been a headache in excel are a couple lines in Python. It’s great (obviously very different use cases from typical spreadsheets)
You know we should start migrating (or porting) our complicated spreadsheets from VB to python. This is a wise move for future proofing.
But I'm also very busy, and a little lazy, so I procrastinate and never do it. Some VMs now are so good that I just open these big visual basic spreadsheets in a windows VM, further delaying the necessary task.
Yeah I’ve done that in a few cases where python is the better tool for the job (pulling new data, cleaning up in a consistent way, and generating reports), but it’s not a great solution for certain workstreams. Especially if you are collaborating with other people who aren’t tech savvy
Things that would have been a headache in excel are a couple lines in Python
I gotta get back into it
S(preadsheet)aaS does not sound like a good replacement for excel. I'm all for alternatives, but giving up even more control is the wrong direction.
And yes there is a self-hosted option, but that's not the main pitch on their website.
Same. And LO cannot do everything MS office does.
It can do major things and Writer is probably 98% there (Calc much lower) but as an example of an obscure feature: Word can do nested tables and last I checked LO cannot. As a major feature Calc cannot do proper tables with headers and sorting and the opinion of the devs is to just use a database which for large sets is fair enough but I semi-often work with smaller sets where it doesn't make sense and I just need a quick CSV sort. I have also tried to convince not so computer literate people to switch to LO and some of them have missed the proper tables support and telling them to learn to use databases isn't an acceptable solution as many of these people are older and their needs are things like finances or lists of their collections of stuff.
Word's styling options are also just leagues ahead if you're preparing documents for the office it's just easier to get better looking results. Same with Powerpoint.
LO can at least freely view Microsoft word formatted documents, which is a big deal because doctors and official documents are usually in the Microsoft word format and I'm not gonna go through the trouble of going through pirated versions of 365.
LO can get me through what I need it for but you're right about excel being ahead of LO. I think Microsoft Office on the pc vs Libre office on Linux is like word on pc vs word on Mac, "just almost close enough."
Have you tried OnlyOffice? It functions much more like MS Office, though I haven't tried the features you're talking about.
And I don't even think about it. Only Office is, unlike Libre Office, not opinionated with respect to the UI and is therefore so similar to MS Office that I can switch between both apps and not miss a beat.
Although Only Office has the advantage of implementing a bunch of QOL improvements that MS Office still has not implemented after all these years. One example that comes to mind is that the default image resize maintains aspect ratio, while in MSOffice you still need to hold SHIFT while resizing.
I tried it in the past, but many other advanced functions I use in LO and MSO aren't available. It's been a while though, I should probably give it a try again.
But why??? LibreOffice is great, isn't made by Microslop, and doesn't use that god-awful ribbon bar.
People can't tell their higher ups what software the company should use.
Because people won't adopt LibeOffice just because you want it
Well I want it and I've adopted it, so...
Make a presentation in libreoffice or onlyoffice, then switch to Microsoft PowerPoint and tell me the user experience, look and time taken is not way better. I like LibreOffice, but if Microsoft office was open source I would 100% use that
Well, I liked MS Office up until 2003, but with 2007 they started changing it for no good reason and I stopped using it. Then Windows started changing for no good reason too. Now I use Linux and LibreOffice, and it's back to how I like it again :)
My expectation is that MS will replace Windows with Linux within the decade with a Windows lookalike theme and Windows style desktop. They will run a Rosetta like VM to keep old apps running. It will be much cheaper, Linux can do anything that Windows can, with much less development costs. They might say that Windows needs at least 16GB RAM to keep that VM running smoothly, plus some new CPU and GPU to keep the hardware industry happy. They will still make it so that Office will only run on their version of Linux.
That's a wild idea, but you know what, I wouldn't be surprised. The past several years I've seen a switch happening - Linux and FOSS overall not having to play catch-up nearly as much, and MS aping or full-on (but quietly) adopting certain aspects of Linux to keep the dwindling captive technical customers from complete revolt.
They will run a Rosetta like VM to keep old apps running
Nah they'll make you get a Windows 365 subscription to keep running incompatible apps in an Azure VM, gotta wet their beak
I think people should instead work on alternative applications to have compatibility with the file format.
Adobe and MS don't play fair on that front too.
I have a LaTeX file from 1993 in my archive dir that I can format and print at a whim. It is a technical manua from an uni research hardware project written in Spanish, initially on an ULTRIX or DEC system, and I converted it once to ISO 8859-1 encoding and once to UTF-8.
There is a brilliant book which helped me a lot to get started with LaTeX,
Leslie Lamport, LaTeX: A Document preparation system.
It is itself a masterpiece of good technical writing. My copy is now 30 years old, and I still use it.
I meant more for the layman who is more comfortable with a wysiwyg system. For me it is great, and I think LyX’s “WYSIWYM” concept is wonderful. But I’d never ask a non-IT co worker to consider those.
Work or school
If your job doesn't provide you with a company issued computer, you should try to find another job. My wife works remotely, and her employer didn't give her a computer, so she uses her own laptop and I find that egregious.
All they said was work or school, they didn't say anything about it being for personal computers. Getting things like this working makes a business using Linux for their work machines even more viable than it already is.
This also makes it so people don't have to buy cheap microslop notebooks or tablets just for work or college. Also makes it so that partitioning doesn't need to happen.
My company issued me a computer with Windows just fine. Except for Office 365, everything else I do is much better to have Linux native on it. So they are perfectly content to help me run Windows, I still don't want to run windows.
I was expecting you to say just use it in a browser, which actually I do 99.5% of the time. However, just last week I had to boot into Windows because of being forced to work a powerpoint presentation in ways the online powerpoint simply won't touch. Similarly, I've heard people speak the same of Excel, but I haven't experienced that one personally.
Incidentally, booting into that Windows install, the updates took about 6 hours before it was happy. Between Microsoft and my work's endpoint management, it's a nightmare to try to maintain the work Windows load. I had a similarly neglected Linux laptop and it took about 30 minutes to chew through an even larger window of updates.
Microslop has windows 10 and 11 for free as iso's on their site because the only thing people pay for now is the registration code.
I download the windows 10 iso, load it onto a cheap ass temu, knockoff SanDisk USB flash drive with impression and loaded it onto my tower......
Apparently it was the windows 11 iso but in the downloaded file of the windows 10 iso. So now there's just dog shit loaded on to my tower but not just any ol' dog shit, it's dog shit that's unable to be removed from my life.
I use my own Windows machine, because they're ubiquitous, but my employer pays the periodic Apple ransom for iOS application publishing to purchase a Mac for my work, because I refuse to buy Apple hardware anymore. Apple decides when you're done developing iOS apps with the hardware you buy from them, not you.
They do. I have introduced Linux desktops as a choice for those that can live e.g. with the browser version of office and don't need our ERP client.
Overcoming one more barrier to entry.
Yeah, no.
Tool suites like Photoshop, they don't bother for a Linux version (and it's historically grown, the original devs probably long retired).
But Microslop? They really don't want their products on Linux. As soon as it gains traction, MS will break it.
Probably. Even the Mac version of Office is slightly shittier.
And it works. I’d love to have a Mac at work, but I absolutely need the windows version of excel to do my job effectively
You know what? That was a great article. Well researched and not too wordy, so I didn’t get bored. If you skipped it and came straight to the comments, you should click it, Adblock or not.
There’s so much slop out here, we should let them know we like this.
Anyway, as for the content of the article… meh, I don’t care about Office but it would be good for Linux in general to have it working.
I assume your IT has done something weird, but for anyone else that reads and thinks this might be a blocker to Linux: these both have fully functional web applications and that's how I use them on Linux at work.
Yeah. For clarification, the reason the web apps do not work well for me is simply because of our cluents' security settings, and because I need to separately connect and sandbox each client. The Outlook webapp has been behaving well enough lately when using Brave Origin containers (some clients require Chromium browsers, otherwise Firefox containers work too). Teams on the other hand does not behave well through whatever they are doing in IT security when using the web app.
And "Windows App" for me...Their new version of the "Remote Desktop" windows app...FML with their naming insanity. Anyway, that's my biggest headache. I have a goddamn VM just for this, with multi-monitor figured out. Just for this crap.
My theory is they want you to get used to the windows app name because eventually they're just gonna sell you Linux PCs with only the ability to reach your windows os like an app in the cloud with windows 365. Everything as a subscription, this is the way!
Ferdium works well enough for me on Linux.
Also SharePoint/OneDrive (the line between the 2 is getting blurry) for shared documents.
Doesn't outlook support imap? Any email client should work with it
Probably not. IMAP is actively discouraged in Exchange 365 - might even be fully disabled these days.
Doesn't outlook support imap?
Officially, it can. Many organizations turn IMAP off "for security reasons."
windows forum instantly announces it's sloppy, confusing rebuttal. Microsoft 365 on Linux: Why the Bottles Claim Needs Caution
Has Copilot "written" that bs?
I tried this for fun myself. Just write a few points what the article is about, what you want the article to sound like and styling, and some technicalities to make it like the other articles. Output 2 variants with different LLMs. Choose one and refine it for a few minutes, until the auto generated images are output. This is the slop generation.
It's a Masterpiece.
If this was still like 2010 I actually would have thought this is pretty nice but office went to complete garbage just likee everything else MSFT has touched this past decade.
Even on windows I've seen random people using libre office instead.
The last time I opened excel it actually died trying to handle my copy paste of a simple list.
Congratulations and condolences
.......more the latter than the former I think
For context, CodeWeavers sells a paid Wine product, CrossOver, and its database still lists Microsoft Office 365 on Linux as "Installs, Will Not Run," last tested against CrossOver 26.3.0.
Office 365 does run in CrossOver, just poorly. They've also recently dropped support for it in CrossOver 26, and AFAIK CrossOver 27 won't be able to run it at all.
So it's good to know that Bottles has effectively replaced it.
Bottles is just wine in a flatpak, if codeweavers is dropping support and other wine devs won’t support it, bottles won’t either.
TIL thanks yeah then that makes sense
Remember that M365 stuff works in a browser too!
I am not going to argue that some people -- both creative and technical -- don't have a need for the native apps. If your line of work standardized on a Microsoft product, fair enough.
If you are not one of those people though (and you have a choice, of course) Teams & Outlook work great as webpages, and they have web versions of the rest of the office suite which I assume work fine for occasional work. I'll usually just try LibreOffice with the file anyway and it works fine.
I wish it were that easy. I work in a corporate environment where we use both the dedicated apps and the webapps. You'd think those would be 1:1 compatible, they are not. Yes you can open files in both, however the formatting, especially from native -> web, constantly messes up. We also use a custom font. Good luck getting that to work in a browser. This is why I think native office apps would be huge for our linux machines (yes we use both)
Sadly, the browser variants lack functionality. In my experience, particularly powerpoint, a colleague says the same of excel.
Thankfully, I rarely need that functionality so I only have to resort to Windows once every few months.
Mirko Brombin, the creator of Bottles
And also of the Singularity desktop environment, and behind cpak and Vanilla OS. Even with AI I don't see where he gets the time and relevant knowledge, and I really wonder how buggy these are. I haven't tried them though, and Bottles seems stable enough.
Bottles Next tho...
Wine is entirely doing it I think, my understanding is the runner is just a fancy configuration tool that makes it easier to get specific things running. Wine has reversed engineered so much and it works great, but sometimes you may need to set several config values to something for a particular app to work right. Imo getting the current office suite running is probably more impressive than any non-game app out there. It's using wine on hard mode.
https://usebottles.com/runners
Different runners. This page explains better.
Why would I want an AI powered office suite?
Fair, but last time I checked Microsoft 365 was also packed with AI. And if I have to choose between AI infested Microsoft and AI infested Non-Microsoft products to open and edit a Word file someone sent me. I’m definitely not choosing Microsoft.
Russian/Chinese spyware. They don't respect open source licenses. At least switch to euro-office when it comes out.
An African kid has to be nuts to be using an "euro"-office, specially one doing a sales pitch for NATO.
Could he, maybe, not do that?
Access is a usable database app? How about Postgres with PGadmin?
.... Why though?
I think this is more of a compatibility benchmark than something anyone is actually going to do.
Exactly my first thought.
Why is the founder of Bottles compared to a toilet doing shitty stuff? Did I miss something?
@lemmy.ml
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@lemmy.ml
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
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I really dislike microsoft office, but the unfortunate reality is that it is used everywhere and it is such a disadvantage not to have, onlyoffice works great for me but the risk of things not looking right when sharing with someone with office is quite big. So I really like this progression, needing to run a full windows emulation to get office is a pain.
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