Ms Office on linux

[xXSuperNOOB65Xx]

I have been using LibreOffice but i want to see if I can run Ms Office on linux, so I installed Office 2016 with playwithlinux successfully, the programs are working but I keep getting visual glitches, any ideas on how to counter that. I am using the latest Pop! Os on my laptop with hybrid amd apu and nvidia gpu.

[Radium_Angel]

Offce 365 is less of a hassle, as it's web-based

[mamamia88]

45 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

Offce 365 is less of a hassle, as it's web-based

This or only office is relatively similar

[maplepants]

A guy at my work uses the Office 365 web apps via electron apps he made using nativefier. He's on Ubuntu 20.04 and it's pretty slick. Since he only ever really needs Word, Excel, or Powerpoint for files that are in some work OneDrive folder the fact that the apps are always online actually doesn't matter at all. The reason why he does it is so that his word documents don't get lost in the other identical Chrome tabs. It's not super resource efficient, but I've seen worse hacks.

 

And in a pinch, he still syncs his OneDrive stuff locally using insync and then works on them with LibreOffice.

[xXSuperNOOB65Xx]

so there isnt anything i can do with the renderer like changing settings in wine or playwithlinux to combat these visual glitches, i mean its still usable when in a document but the visual glitches are a bit annoying.

 

[maplepants]

8 minutes ago, xXSuperNOOB65Xx said:

so there isnt anything i can do with the renderer like changing settings in wine or playwithlinux to combat these visual glitches

There probably is, but the settings you need to find are probably unique to exactly your hardware and OS version. So you're not likely to find them online, and no one here is likely to know them. 

 

In the PlayOnLinux forum thread for Office 2016 there might be some hints, but it's hard to say. Graphical glitches are pretty common in these kind of emulated workflows and can be very tricky to debug.

[dragonfly43]

VirtualBox to the rescue.

I haven't touched real windows for a while.

[Guest]

Microsoft Office is known to be problematic under WINE and is not reliable. There was a time when the community kept up with it, but since the introduction of Office 365 Online and the improvements in LibreOffice, those efforts have pretty much died.

If you want to use Linux, your reliable options are LbreOffice (Open Source), OnlyOffice (Mixed (Open-Source & Proprietary), considered safe), WPS Office (Proprietary, considered Spyware), and Office 365 Online.

 

Don't depend on WINE for anything that needs to be available at any given time. This includes things like Steams Proton, Lutris, PlayOnLinux, etc...

 

 

[D-reaper]

On 11/15/2021 at 1:50 PM, xXSuperNOOB65Xx said:

I have been using LibreOffice but i want to see if I can run Ms Office on linux, so I installed Office 2016 with playwithlinux successfully, the programs are working but I keep getting visual glitches, any ideas on how to counter that. I am using the latest Pop! Os on my laptop with hybrid amd apu and nvidia gpu.

Not worth it; considering there are office suites that look similar to MS Offce and that can run natively on Linux. Take a look at WPS Office, OpenOffice or Softmaker FreeOffice. Really, MS Office is just another office suite.

 

And for the future, avoid all Nvidia GPUs too. Go full AMD.

[Herr.Hoefkens]

as i also mentioned in the chat: yes ms office runs fine on linux using wine (the native versions) i tried and tested the following MS Office Suites:

wine versions used for testing: (newer wil also work probably)

• Wine : Lutris-6.14-4 (get it here : standalone lutris runners , if you dont want it coupled with the lutris app itself. i use it for the nice build in toolkit it provides)
• Crossover 21.0.0 demo

 

MS Office 2010 Plus (with visio):

• wine (lutris)
• default installer works, activation works and software runs as good as in windows.( verry fast no crashes so far)
• every app works appart from the skype that comes allong but thats due  to the version number of skype itself
• also tested this install using crossover and this also provides a seemless install and some nice menu entries for the indivitual exe's
• mimetipes also work and auto open the desired app

MS Office 2016 / 2019 Pro Plus (is the same office "version underneath" and were similar in experience :

• wine(lutris),proton,crossover ((note this version of office requires you make a 32bit only wine prefix toinstall it in (set WINEARCH=win32)
• installer runs untill just before finish, where it throws an error and rolls back the install
• installed it in windows, then ran the exe's with wine wich worked almost perfect , (wine lacks the registry of the windows install so no activation, and the activation itself wouldnt work either (serial on the box returned invalid the second i entered it). couldd have fiddled with it to get it working but i did the following instead
• installed it completely in a clean vm , running vmware thinapp allong with it , intalled and activated it , then created the thinap, and the "custom" msi instller.
• tested this installer on linux with wine , installs , exe's run and the product is activated after install .
• all aps work aside from the onedrive wich wont launch , havent looked further into it because thats the first thing i disable on windows anyway

 

MS Office 365:

• used the crossover demo for this one (i dont own a licence to the office product anyway , so i had to borrow a key from a friend who has a subscription for 4 pc's)
• installed and worked fine used the installer included with the wine365, and downloaded the software using the browser extention from the crossover site (spoofs the useragent string of the browser)
• found a deployment intaller on github havent tested it but it seems like it could work for installing it with regular wine aswel (as it specifies it includes all runtime depencies for the installer to work in the binary)
• tested if the exes in the crossover bottle also run with setting the env wineserver and wineloader vars to the lutris wine ones , and this also worked fine.

 

 

[ultra99]

On 11/16/2021 at 8:51 PM, dragonfly43 said:

VirtualBox to the rescue.

I haven't touched real windows for a while.

I tried that myself but things really slow/laggy. Even dragging apps....how's your experience?

[D-reaper]

12 hours ago, ultra99 said:

I tried that myself but things really slow/laggy. Even dragging apps....how's your experience?

I'd say running MS Office on Linux isn't worth it with Wine. But you can try this: https://github.com/Osmium-Linux/winapps

 

I've tried it. It works okay for what it is.

[dragonfly43]

On 12/1/2021 at 8:03 PM, ultra99 said:

I tried that myself but things really slow/laggy. Even dragging apps....how's your experience?

No problem.

I have an 4770K, and a Nvidia GTX 1060, 10G RAM. Give the Windows 7 guest 2G Ram, 2 threads.

Boost the Virtual Video Memory to the max (128MB).