{"slug": "show-hn-microsoft-office-running-with-wine-on-linux-with-no-virtualization", "title": "Show HN: Microsoft Office Running with Wine on Linux with No Virtualization", "summary": "A developer has demonstrated Microsoft Office running on Linux through Wine with no virtualization, using Nix Flakes and the latest GE-Proton, with the work largely performed by Claude Code with Fable under a Claude Max subscription. The proof-of-concept requires a valid Office 365 license and browser-based registration on Microsoft's website, works only with Wayland rather than X, and was tested solely on NixOS with Sway and KDE. The developer said the biggest hangup for people switching from Windows to Linux is the lack of desktop Microsoft Office and that they don't want to run a VM to get around it.", "body_md": "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.\n\nMultiple 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.\n\nI 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!\n\nI 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.\n\nThis 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.\n\nThis 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.\n\nFull 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.\n\nComments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746401](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746401)\n\nPoints: 1\n\n# Comments: 2", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-microsoft-office-running-with-wine-on-linux-with-no-virtualization", "canonical_source": "https://github.com/Tombert/office365_flake", "published_at": "2026-09-17 20:52:22+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-17 21:25:37.972891+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools", "developer-tools", "ai-agents"], "entities": ["Microsoft Office", "Wine", "Linux", "Nix Flakes", "NixOS", "Claude Code", "Fable", "Claude Max"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-microsoft-office-running-with-wine-on-linux-with-no-virtualization", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-microsoft-office-running-with-wine-on-linux-with-no-virtualization.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-microsoft-office-running-with-wine-on-linux-with-no-virtualization.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-microsoft-office-running-with-wine-on-linux-with-no-virtualization.jsonld"}}