Office on Wine, or the competition's inadequacy

Productivity tools should not be frustrating to use, that's the whole point. Unfortunately, not many tools bring the best experience.

The burden of my journey

I have worked with proprietary tools such as Microsoft Office and Google Docs. They work mostly fine, get the work done and the amount of everyday bugs and glitches is small.

When I stopped using Windows and started to work on personal and/or sensitive works (that is, stuff which I wanted to keep offline and share with just a few people), I couldn't pick either one: Microsoft Office doesn't work on Linux, or so I thought, and Google Docs is a no-go because it'a cloud-first product.

So... open-source alternatives to the rescue, no?

Well, no. My experience with the open-source alternatives has been a net negative over the years. As a person that tries to avoid closed, proprietary and locked-in products, that is not something I say lightheartedly.

What alternatives, though? I tried many of them:

• LibreOffice: this was actually a great choice 90% of the times, until I tried to share my document with someone else and everything broke. The UI feels like a throwback to the past: is neither good-looking (but it's a productivity tool, it has to be!) nor working fine. It gets you far, but for me it was not enough. I complain about crashes, layout issues, generally broken things. I gave it multiple chances and in turn I got disappointed each single time.
• OnlyOffice: they were the first to bring fresh air regarding the user interface, finally something on par with its competitors! Their suite works, and does it well... until I managed to work on a moderately complicated spreadsheet and the pdf export function was broken. Insanely broken. Also, seems like the company behind the product is a bit obscure, so I preferred to stop using their suite.
• SoftMaker: I used their tools for a while, but I ultimately stopped in 2020 (before a timid re-attempt in 2023). So many years later, maybe I should've given them another chance, because until I stopped to use them I very much recommended them. I have a nice memory of their document editor, but it didn't work good enough for me (I forgot the exact issue that convinced me to uninstall it, but if everything had worked well, this article would not exist).
• Collabora: I recently tried their Android application, it was slow and unstable. I was dissatified so much that I didn't even bother to install the desktop application. Well, I tried, but their website required to compile a free demo sign-up just for the download. No, thanks.
• OpenOffice: I list it only for the sake of completeness, but nowadays it's just an outdated version of LibreOffice.

So... back to the start: what if it was possible to run Office on other OSes, and not just on Windows?

The need for performance

I mean, running Office in a full Windows virtualized environment could have worked quite easily, I have no doubts.

But it required way too many resources on my almost-decade old laptop. I was not going to pursue this path and be satisfied with it.

So I went straight for the light emulation way, using Wine and its wrappers.

First tries

For a few days, I tried to follow a great amount of tutorials all around the Internet. Long story short, none of them worked. Often, it was extra-frustrating because each time I had to download and install whole GBs of new software (on my ADSL-grade connection).

I tried Wine. I tried PlayOnLinux. I tried Bottles. I almost tried Proton and Lutris, too, but further researches made me refrain (they are gaming-specific). Each time, I tried to tweak the current Wine environment with Winetricks.

Sometimes the Office installer started but crashed or freezed or just errored out after a while. But, most of the times, it didn't start at all.

I lost several hours to all this. Yet, I made no progress at all.

Fighting fire with fire

Then, I discovered CrossOver, which is a proprietary but improved Wine version that targets many popular Windows software, like Office. The team behind CrossOver is the very same behind Wine. CrossOver includes all the extra required patches to run all their supported products, so I expected the setup to be easier. There's only one catch: CrossOver is not a fully free software, but rather a trialware, which means it requires a license to work beyond the first trial days. But I was determined to end this nightmare, so I downloaded the installer.

Again, it didn't work, because my operative system lacked some obscure library that stopped shipping months or years ago. Installing that library manually proved to be painful because it was in conflict with newer libraries.

I agreed with myself there was no need to break my own system to try to install a freeware application I didn't even know if it worked or not.

To use a trialware (CrossOver) to run a Freemium software (Office)? I was essentially fighting fire with fire. Ironic.

Ultimately, I decided to wrap it up myself.

The final breakthrough: Office on Wine

I had a spare Office 2016 Volume License (VL) version, so I wanted to install it. I mounted the ISO image:

mount -o loop,ro -t iso9660 *.ISO

After gaining some familiarity with the whole Wine procedures, terminology, general things to do and so on, I tried to create a 32-bit Windows 7 prefix and then installing some libraries using winetricks.

export WINEARCH=win32
export WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.local/share/wine_for_office"
winecfg
winetricks msxml3 msxml6 corefonts riched20 msftedit vb6run gdiplus
wine Setup.exe

It worked! The installer loaded just fine, without any visual glitch at all (unlike previous attempts) and I managed to install the whole suite (even though I just needed Word and Excel, more on that later).

I stress that the x86 (32 bit) version is very important and that WoW64 (32-bit emulation with 64-bit libraries) must not be used (as per this date) because compatibility is still experimental (hence the export WINARCH=win32).

Later, I had to edit ~/.local/bin because things I didn't want or need got installed anyway, as I didn't use a custom installer file nor, as I wrote before, I managed to do it through the installer itself (seems like options weren't clickable, I couldn't unselect them). It was just mime-type stuff, so a trivial move to the wastebin was all that was needed.

Soon, I'll use bubblewrap (bwrap) to isolate the whole Wine environment and stop all the Office telemetry stuff for good.

Does it work well?

The only broken stuff I faced, so far, is opening specific files: each time, Word and Excel just open a new document, not the one I double-clicked on. The easy workaround is to use the "Open..." menu each time, which works. I tried to fix that issue but It didn't work. For now, it doesn't annoy me.

The runtime it's a little sluggish (still faster than a fully virtualized OS), but it works really fine and gets the job done, without crashes or similar. By sluggish, I mean that the animations are a bit clunky sometimes (it's barely noticeable) and the interactive UI feels to have a few milliseconds of lag (like 100ms-200ms). Writing text, on the other side, seems to be instantaneous. Disclaimer: I just tried Word and Excel, that's all I needed.

I tried to install d3dx9 (directx9 was marked as deprecated) but this didn't improve performance at all. Never mind, I'm fine with that.

I just wanted to say that I felt bad how much productivity stuff I was actually missing. The whole Office experience is just... better. It's insane to me that the state of the other productivity tools is so unpolished, after all these years. It feels bad to say, but they have been very much unproductivity tools, to me, and it's sad. At least, I tried.

Notable mentions

In this article I focused on WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") editors, that's why I didn't bother to talk about LaTeX and its alternatives.

I lacked the willingness to learn it, because its steep learning curve requires some good amount of time before finally becoming productive.

But I tried Typst for some hours. It seems really good, produces beautiful PDFs, it's very versatile and, overall, I'm impressed with the tooling and its whole ecosystem.

I'll probably learn it for good one day but, for now, I'm better off with visual tools.