Office 365/2016 on Manjaro Linux

SenKa · April 11, 2019

Join me in my thread of Linux escapades as I attempt to make WINE actually work!

Some background: Office 365 is required by my school. If you don't have it, not only are you basically DOA for all courses, but some assignments are more or less impossible given the limitations of Libre Office and Open Office. And, with Windows 10 seeming to get more bloated and buggier as time goes on, I am looking for an alternative. macOS was hopeful, until I realized they disabled the macOS license for Office 365... Though pirating may be an option, and one I heavily considered, I'd rather not. It's a waste of my tuition, since part of it is paying for these licenses.

So... why Manjaro? Mostly because I wanted to try my hand at Arch. I already like it more than Debian based distros I had tried prior. Way lighter weight, and funnily enough more stable.

The first sign of this is WINE, which is way more stable on Manjaro than it ever was on Ubuntu! I actually got the installer to start. I even got the installers for UPlay and Origin to launch and fully install, though with a broken GUI (as a result of not using a dGPU, I would imagine. I am using an old C2D laptop as my test machine)

First try: WINE Defaulted to 32 bit Prefix, 32 bit installer.

Would not even attempt to install. Got stuck on "Getting ready" for about 5 minutes and crashed.

Second try: WINE defaulted to 32 bit prefix, 64 bit installer.

Actually worked the best, somehow??? Got to 55% and crashed, but this one seems immensely stupid to me that it worked in the slightest.

Third try: WINE defaulted to 64 bit prefix, 64 bit installer

Got to ~30% and crashed, but looked the least broken.

I am aware that WINE 64 bit is bugged like crazy when attempting to use 32 bit applications in 64 bit mode, hence why I tried the 64 bit installer. Is there anything I'm missing? I have read threads of people getting this to work on Manjaro, but I can't manage. Is it a hardware issue? I would imagine it certainly could be. If it is, I have another laptop with a dGPU I can use to test it on.

Also, using a VM worked even less due to a lack of hardware acceleration in VMWare.