Comment by tombert
2 days ago
I have a near infinite amount of respect for Wine. It seems like for at least the last twenty years, Wine just keeps getting better and better with every release.
I don’t know for sure, but I suspect a lot of the work is spent sussing out weird edge cases with different binaries. This is tedious, thankless work, but it is necessary to have true Windows compatibility.
Wine and Proton have gotten so good that I don’t bother even checking compatibility before I buy games. The game will likely run just as well or better than on Windows and it is so consistently good that it’s not worth the small effort to check ProtonDB.
I do wish that they would get Office 2024 working on Wine. This isn’t a dig at the Wine devs at all, I am sure that it’s a very hard problem, but if I can get that then I will have even more ammunition to get my parents to drop windows entirely.
Sadly Wine only seems to be working well for games. Every non gaming app I've tried to run does not work. It does seem like Valve and the gaming community is contributing almost all the effort on the project.
CodeWeavers sells app support: https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover
I haven't been able to get MSOffice working, but I didn't have much issue getting Toon Boom Animate to work. Which apps give you trouble?
If its for your parents, then why not switch them to OnlyOffice? Its UI is very similar to MSO and it has excellent compatibility with the 2007+ file formats (much better than LibreOffice).
Oh it’s not for lack of trying on my end. I tried getting them to play with OnlyOffice, and they said it was worse.
If it doesn’t say Microsoft Office on there, they will say it’s worse. Objectivity has little to do with it.
In a bit of fairness, my dad makes extremely liberal use of the VBA in Excel, and I am not sure how compatible OnlyOffice is for that.
There's an alternative project that runs Windows apps in a VM but integrates them fully and transparently into your Linux desktop, with MS Office particularly tended to. The apps run as if they're native to Linux. It was discussed here just this past week.
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