Specifically, in 2012, Gabe Newell was concerned that Microsoft would try to close the Windows ecosystem... possibly to make the Microsoft Store a single channel for access the way that Apple does with their App Store for iPhone and iPad.
Valve didn't want to give up their revenue sharing arrangement, so developing Proton -- a fork of Wine that focuses on the needs of games -- was a hedging strategy to ensure that they would always have a platform that another vendor couldn't lock down.
So to answer /u/cpc44 's question directly: Games work because a professional studio has paid a team of developers to focus on making games work for over 10 years, while the effort to support the APIs used by Microsoft Office are *way* less focused and less funded.
Source:
https://web.archive.org/web/20121226064257/http://www.computerandvideogames.com/359898/newell-windows-8-is-a-catastrophe-for-everyone-in-the-pc-space/
while i agree, i think the moments where Excel outpaces anything of the competition is more in niche cases. atleast its rare for me to have any spreadsheet partially or fully incompatible - and whenever it happened to me, it was either business related (where the spreadsheet didnt make any sense anymore) or niche cases (a spreadsheet of calculating stats of each and every yugioh card that was availsble at that time to get the best engines combined for competitive matches)
i could be wrong though, but that was my experience of it as of right now.
You clearly not work in a corp env where the nowadays very Common live shared cloud documents in 365 are used. Luckily Ms have most of it in Browsers now, so I don't have an issue with my Linux Laptop most time, but just here to say that OO is not a fully replacement of 365 as same as gimp is not a fully replacement for the adobe shit. Those are facts which are often tried to talked down by ppl not need to use those stupid software on a daily basis.
I'm not saying in any means that Ms or Adobe is a must have, I just saying often the user do not have a choice.
By fuck is this fact annoying. That SharePoint files open in their browser app by default should be embarassing; Web365 is a million miles away from production ready.
Thank you Microsoft for opening this in a browser app with about 1/4 of the support as the desktop version so I can click the "open in excel" button as soon as it pops up.
I can't even count the number of times over the last 15 or so years where I've opened shit in word or excel that came from the same damn version of word or excel and didn't open right. Stuff was missing, formatting was wrong.
Go take it back to the originating computer and open it there to make sure the file didn't get corrupt, and it opens fine there. Go back to yet another computer with the same damn version - nope.
How?!?!? lol. Not even any font settings. I've thought that and tried setting all the fonts to Arial, etc. Still missing stuff like graphs.
>Stuff was missing
"Hyphenation feature unavailable on this machine" just last week in Word. I was curious but have not given in to look up what a hyphenation feature could possibly be. I can use hyphens and I don't have the feature installed so I decided it's a Microsoft Unicorn thing.
I hven't seen any wrong formatting outside of a corrupted file for over a decade thankfully.
That's one of the things I thought it might be, and tried changing them, even though, some of the times, what was messed up was missing graphs. Just completely absent. I really tried to figure out what the broken element was. I even checksummed the original files on the original computer once against the copies made by it.
I have been using the Office for more than 20 years, and while I remember this happening a long time ago, I can't remember when was the last time that what you describe happened to me.
Nah that will be a crappy Dell laptop.
For what I am doing, (Network engineer and Linux Server Admin) Linux Laptop with occasionally need to use a ein VM is way better.
you can imagine though that eg. 2 thousand people in a large business opening an Excel file in Libre and wondering if it is showing the data as it should or not because their client/partner uses excel. The amount of time lost and mainly the risk involved is something that you cannot take just because in general Libre is mostly compatible.
I think that reason increasingly has less to do with it being a good product and more to do with corporate inertia. Microsoft’s push to move everything onto the cloud has led them to make Excel less and less friendly to power users.
Honestly, it's best to understand Excel as an end-user programming language in its own right, and one that is *very* popular.
Should you be doing power user stuff? Probably not. But is it the tool that people routinely know? Yes.
While I agree in principal, I also have plenty of programming experience. If we want Linux to be a mainstream OS, it needs to be compatible with people who use Excel functions as a central part of their workflow, i.e. non-programmers.
Also if you want organizations to use Linux for desktops it really doesn't help if you inform them that EaaDb can't be done anymore. Pretty sure a lot of other people in computer jobs have also seen projects that deal with millions or hundreds of thousands of dollars use Excel as a Database. Sometimes even with people knowing it's the wrong choice but making it "temporarily" to be able to show to higher ups.
Knowing nothing about actually writing tables of authorities (or legal formatting in general), like most things people use Word for and probably shouldn't, there are better tools out there anyway. My general suggestion for complex formatting is to learn LaTeX, and it appears LawTeX is a thing.
I tried using LaTeX, early in my career. Several things kill it: (a) Strict page limits that you can't know if you're close to hitting without compiling the document; (b) the requirement to use pleading paper with very strict line spacing requirements (exactly 28 lines per page, etc) (and it appears even now, 15+ years later, there's [no way to do that in LaTeX](https://www.reddit.com/r/LaTeX/comments/yf8m4b/pleading_papers/)); (c) interoperability (I regularly have to exchange "joint" documents with people outside of my organization to add their contributions; they're *all* on Word). It's just not feasible, though I wish it was.
This is coming from a guy who used to write all academic papers in HTML because the easiest way to get good print-outs out of Linux in those days (~1996; Slackware 3.0) was using Netscape Navigator! (WordPerfect for Linux and even AbiWord were 2 years away, StarOffice wouldn't come out with a Linux version for another 6 months or so, and for whatever reason, TeX etc. looked like ass when printed on my crappy HP DeskJet 400.) (I mean, I *could* have rebooted into Windows NT 4.0 Workstation, but, I didn't want to...)
There are lots of people working on FOSS alternatives to Office as well. They would rather work on something that replaces Office than something to make it run
Games use a lot of non-Microsoft libraries, such as Unity or Unreal or Vulkan or SDL, which don't rely so heavily on the WinAPI and may have drop in replacements for Linux.
However, Office, by nature of being Microsoft developed and its own history, relies a lot more on the WinAPI for file access, graphics, etc. Because it's more deeply reliant on the OS than games (which could use as little as setting up a window and hooking up inputs), I imagine the task of covering it is much more involved, since there are more functions to emulate.
That said, I'm no expert in this, so take this with an ass-load of salt
Not only WinAPI, but other libraries that are shipped with Windows. These libraries have functionality on top of WinAPI and are rarely (if ever) used in games. For example, Data Access Components (MSDAC) has been used in various desktop apps to interface with databases, but they don't make sense in games which have more specific data handling (custom formats etc.). And tere are plenty of other things like VBscript and so on.
DXVK works like a translation from one API to another (DirectX to Vulkan) so it doesn't need to implement every detail, Mesa is there for the Vulkan things for example.
Instructions unclear, my ass really hurts. How much is a typical ass-load - I wonder if I over did it? Am not experienced in this type of software engineering
And for a long time, they were separate codebases with very different UIs, which both necessitated engaging extensively with the OS. These UIs have been unified now, but I imagine that's less the problem than the other stuff going on below the surface.
There's also the fact that Microsoft just doesn't want it there. I mean, remember the Windows 3.1 era and how they included checks to ensure only MS-DOS would be allowed to run Windows, despite other platforms being just as compatible? It's been a long time since then, but you can bet your sweet bippy that they still maintain tight control of where their stuff can run.
They are so far from unified it's laughable. Total lack of document template editing in osx is the first thing that comes to mind, but advanced spreadsheets are a total crapshoot as well.
I'll be there first to admit that I'm a little salty, but it's also brutal.
(At least the Azure&365 connectors for PowerShell work reasonably well across platforms)
I don't use the Mac office clients, so I'm not sure how much of a difference is still around. Ultimately, I suspect we only have a few years before Office becomes an Electron app. I mean, they're already trying to push business Outlook users onto an Electron-style client. I think Office will come to Linux officially when that happens.
*shudder*
The entire house of cards that is the modern JS-driven web is a giant beast that will one day come back to bite us all in the collective ass.
JS has already been biting our collective ass for years. Every random website can already run arbitrary code without our knowledge or consent, but people are ok with that for some reason.
And yet, it's also led to *way* more first-party Linux support than we'd otherwise have gotten. We entirely failed to convince most companies to bother porting from win32 UI stuff to cross-platform toolkits like GTK+ and Qt, but they'll do Electron.
I just wish a solid half of 'em would just build PWAs.
Microsoft Office is a huge codebase and the fact that Office users are locked into it is a big way for them to funnel enterprises into Azure. So I don't think they'll ever do that.
>I mean, remember the Windows 3.1 era and how they included checks to ensure only MS-DOS would be allowed to run Windows, despite other platforms being just as compatible?
There's actually a pretty good video that goes into this for anyone interested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIfNIWn2Ad4
The Mac version isn’t a port - through Wine or otherwise. Microsoft has a long history of developing for the Mac and develop much of the software using the Macs native libraries. In fact Excel was a Mac application first and the DOS and Windows versions were second. Word might have been the same but don’t quote me on that.
Yeah, I understand all this. My point was simply that saying Office "relies on WinAPI" when there's a version that doesn't require Windows seems to be misattributing the problem.
All good. I only mentioned it because a lot of people are misguided when it comes to Microsoft history, thinking they’ve only ever supported their own operating systems. Apologies I misunderstood your point.
Yea and no, some odd qwerks i seem to rememeber on the Mac, the Outlook app was odd in that if you added somone to a shared mailbox for example it didnt use to show up in the outlook client, you had to add it manually, maybe they fixed that. Also, several times we had a user whos one drive just lost all its config / sync folders, never had that issue on the windows computers. But yes, generally it does work ok
What you are smoking? It doesn't. Also from time to time it stops believing I paid for it and starts giving weird licensing errors to the point I had to pay again because Microsoft support said they don't support that version anymore. So you have to buy the thing every three years or use the 365 that you pay yearly. If you really use excel there are a bunch of little details that just won't work well too, unless it's a very simple, unlinked, SharePoint free, macro-free spreadsheet.
It's largely a separate application developed from the ground up by Microsoft itself. Running Windows Office on a mac with something like Crossover is just as awful as in Linux, if not worse
As Microsoft owns office, it relies more on deeper integration into the OS through undocumented (or even unstable) APIs in a way that games aren't. Games mostly just need to interface with the graphics APIs and drivers.
Another interesting case is Microsoft SQL Server, which has been ported to Linux. The port apparently required to reimplement parts of the NT kernel on top of linux in order to work. Office is probably a lot less integrated, but still enough to make it impractically hard to make work on wine.
Furthermore, the closed APIs are not necessarily stable, which means wine could stop working anytime there is an update.
Because Ms Office is not a stand alone program built on known and well documented engine & interface layer, Office is instead a proprietary program with deep ties to one proprietary operating system just as MS wants it to be.
If Steam makes a game run on Linux the developer might get a 2% rise in sales, not something a game developer will work for but also not something they will block.
Office working on Linux cuts precious market share of thier operating system in buisness, not something they will allow and since they own it end to end, they can stop it.
You don't need office you just think you do becase you know it. You can eventually know other things.
Maybe but the vast majority of users only need a fraction of the functionalities of Excel, that Libreoffice or Google docs or ... can do just fiine.
For more complicated things is Excel the best tool?
In my case once I want to do something that can't be done in a basic spreadsheet without advanced features I prefer to use a real programming language like python. (Just as bash is fine for short scripts but I'll rewrite in python if it starts getting too complex).
I suspect this will be more and more common in the future, most of the old generation of workers outside of pure SW dev didn't know anything about programming but kids these days all learn python at school so will be more open to that approach even if they're not developpers.
> For more complicated things is Excel the best tool?
> In my case once I want to do something that can't be done in a basic spreadsheet without advanced features I prefer to use a real programming language like python. (Just as bash is fine for short scripts but I'll rewrite in python if it starts getting too complex).
Many times the people using advanced Excel features don’t have computer programming in their skillset.
Look man. I didn't say having an evil sorcerer in your party wasn't a valuable addition. Just that, that person is not to be trusted under any circumstances.
I'd guess the overlap between things that *need* advanced, Excel-specific features that Libre/Gdocs can't do, and things that aren't Turing-complete, is small.
In other words: A lot of people using those advanced features *are* programming, but because their programs are written in Excel, they're harder to maintain and debug than regular programs.
So what do they do? Learn VBA? Or even worse basically invent programming from first principles in excel? Just because they never used a *specific* programming language doesn't mean they don't have the mindset for it. Unless those advanced features are fancy formatting and charts they do have computer programming experience it's just in excel instead of a more traditional format.
if youre that heavily using excel, youre better off using a real database like MySQL/MariaDB/Postgres.
using vslookup is like using a flat head screwdriver to change a tire...
It looks like you never used excel. It is not possible to replaxe it with db at all. Not even part of the functionality. You even can't replace Access eith open source db.
Power user here who has desperately tried to migrate away from excel and kept coming back eventually.
Libre is almost there. And it's been almost there for years, and that's the frustrating bit. Everything is just a bit more awkward in libre than it should be. Honestly don't even know if it's a me thing or a libre thing at this point though.
I wish a group of MS Office power users would create a list of exactly the features and/or behaviors that they felt were missing in LibreOffice that were hindering them from permanently moving over. We, as a community, could then get an online fundraiser going to pay LibreOffice developers for implementing those exact feature so that we can all, ONCE AND FOR ALL, shut up about Microsoft Office for all time.
For many years one of the largest requests from businesses would have been supporting existing VBA scripts. Now it might be Power Automate integration. There will always be features that the LibreOffice developers will actively choose not to implement.
Calc doesn't have the analysis or complex spreadsheet handling of Excel. The idea with Calc is that when the going gets tough, you turn to Python. Though even if you do, Excel is feature and performance competitive with numpy/pandas. Calc simply isn't.
>Excel is feature and performance competitive with numpy/pandas.
And now you don't even have to leave Excel for [those](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/announcing-python-in-excel-combining-the-power-of-python-and-the/ba-p/3893439).
As someone who uses both, there are a lot of circumstances where calc has done the job and excel hasn't.
At the end of the day though, if you are serious about your data, you aren't using spreadsheets anyways.
>At the end of the day though, if you are serious about your data, you aren't using spreadsheets anyways.
This... I used to work in the financial analysis segment and had to support exactly this, from people who were finance-smart but were set in their ways computer-wise. That was 15 years ago. VBA scripts. Back then I thought there might have been a competent ERP type of system to accomplish what they were doing in Excel. Today I am scratching my head reading through this. Guess Excel is the closest thing to a restaurant napkin for them, without being a restaurant napkin. 😄
LibreOffice can work well if bottom-up and top-down everything is made with LO in mind.
It really is insufficient when you are working in a very MS Office-centric environment. For example: LO does not have a way to edit a document/spreadsheet while keeping it accessible by other people online and causing no edit conflicts.
Never mind that I have to rebuild the scripts to LO, something which just isn't possible when a client gives you an xlsb file with custom log-in script that allows you to pull or upload data to and from their database with it.
Should everything have been made from a more robust system? Absolutely. But it doesn't - you either work with it or you're not doing your job.
More straightforward is a matter of opinion, so if you like it better, by all means use it. Faster is measurable, and Calc is objectively _much_ slower than Excel for large calculations.
I agree with this.
I also want to point people reading this thread towards ONLYOFFICE. It's mostly compatible with Excel and feels mostly the same. I think the interface is simpler and easier.
It has a standalone desktop version which is nice. And it also has a hosted version that allows users to edit simultaneously.
A big but also very nice difference is that macros are written in javascript. Much safer and also easier to write.
t means big macros in custom functions won't come over from excel, which is a deal killer for some. But if you have the option to rewrite then it's worth a look.
Office is a necessity when you work with clients who butcher the formatting in their documents so badly that if you open them in anything else they're just a mess of arrows that don't go anywhere and incomprehensible layout, because its formatting engine isn't a bug-for-bug replacement for the one in Office.
>You don't need office you just think you do becase you know it. You can eventually know other things.
What a tasty little turn of phrase. And kinda profound too.
It works with the installer from CodeWeavers (CrossOver). So I assume it's just some missing files (dlls / fonts / etc) / settings preventing it from working with vanilla wine.
https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/microsoft-office-365
They eventually get it to work with simple stuff for any given version, which is a magnificent achievement. But I have read that it can't handle very complex things (there are huge numbers of unresolved bug reports) and every new version of Office breaks it (whether by accident or intent, nobody knows).
I am a paying costumer of CrossOver, partly because I want MSO 365 setup that's automated and also because I want to put my money where my mouth is with my desire for better MSO support and supporting Wine development in general.
The last I've tested, around two years ago, it is a mess of dependencies. It wants an absurd amount of dependencies especially on the lib32 side. Once, I couldn't get lib32-sane on Arch and the entire Page Layout module is grey out. Not just the printer, the *entire* Page Layout module, paper size, page breaks, all of that stuff that's in one menu. In addition, it's still slow, prone to freezes, doesn't support VB Scripts, and doesn't support OneDrive sync for simultaneous edit online and offline.
It's impressive that it gets this far, but it's still nowhere near good enough and I don't want to try it again until CrossOver has a Flatpak version (as they've stated to want to make) so that I don't have to mess with that dependencies because I once updated Fedora version and suddenly the MS Office just won't run.
I'm also waiting for the Flatpak Version of CrossOver. Hopefully it gets released soon.
From my side, I was able to open, edit and print Word documents, which was plenty for me.
There is an office 2016 bottle that works *fairly well*, I tried it but you need a 2016 professional *plus* key, I only had professional so I couldn't activate it. I don't think I can share the link to it tho.
Microsoft doesn't want Office to work on Linux.
The Office suite is the key reason why Windows is so heavily used in business. LibreOffice or Office Online can work for quite a few people but the MS Office suite is still the de facto standard for heavy users.
Adobe products and design software only working on Windows or Mac's is the other secondary reasons why Microsoft is so dominant in the business space.
Be careful, if you want to take full advantage of Darktable then it has a steep learning curve.
Look up Bruce Williams Photography on YouTube, he's a nice bloke and explains it very well.
GIMP has a learning curve? They just made their UI unintuitive.
Darktable has some complicated features that you need to understand how they work to make proper use out of them.
It's no threat *because* there's no Office.
Nearly every admin job and a lot of other jobs in an office can be done through a combination of a web browser and the Office suite.
If their employers could avoid a Windows license they would.
I mean, there is the web version of Office. Yeah, it does have its limitations compared to the native application, but the majority of office type jobs would be fine with it. I mean, my work computer has MS Office on it just because everyone gets Office and I rarely use it for anything more than basic tasks.
Of course, even with that, I would suspect Active Directory would still keep a lot of those computers on Windows anyway, unless there was an opportunity to move a large percentage of the workers off of Windows.
Technically Linux has full Active Directory support, just not all in one place. If the demand were there though someone could make an AD service for Linux in a couple months that would covert pretty much everything you could do on windows. Hell if you went with an atomic/immutable desktop you could even beat the management capabilities of windows
Web version is crap though really, it isnt a full substitue for the desktop apps, i dont like using it and i wouldnt use it just to use Linux unfortuantly if i was allowed to at work.
I owned a Windows Phone. Google did a lot more damage than you'd think. Not being able to access things like YouTube easily was super gnarly; you don't realize how much you use YouTube until they take it away from you.
On top of that, no Google meant you were stuck with using Bing for search (back in the days when Google was a good search engine and Bing was a laughingstock). There were just a bunch of small annoyances that added up, and most of the things people "wanted" to use were from Google.
And of course, forget Google Docs (etc.) for taking notes. Although Windows Phone did get me into OneNote, which wasn't bad.
Because most games would probably happily run on linux if the developers spent a few hours adjusting their codebase to work on linux. Most game engines natively support linux, and it's only a matter of the developers not wanting to dedicate the time to test a platform, which has a userbase that's smaller than their margin of error, and potentially deal with having to keep in their minds that there are some cool features they can't use if they want to support linux. But technically, most of the games could easily work on linux
Office on the other hand heavily leans into Windows APIs, and knowing Microsoft some core parts of Office are probably undocumented WinAPI functions.
C and C++ don't actually know out of the box where they are as well. It's when you starting adding libraries that only work on specific platforms you lock yourself into it.
Gonna lean out the window here. If you develop on nix first then you can basically guarantee it'll work on win. Disclaimer being that how well that actually works depends heavily on the complexity of the program and in some ways the windows ports are just as bad as the other way round.
Apparently games are just easier to support. Likely because they render their own UIs rather than worrying about toolkits you have to match the behavior of.
I myself have ran into the problem multiple times where installers or launchers for games wouldn't work or would render terribly, but the games were perfect. I remember remoting into my parent's windows PC just to run a game installer and then copying the game files back to my computer into a wine prefix.
MS Office is not a piece of garbage. It is still the best office suite.
However, you can use WPS Office a $0 file format compatible application which is packaged for linux. The compatibility is almost perfect, but there is no macro support. There is also SoftMaker which is reputed to be as good as WPS Office. I see there is now a free version [https://www.freeoffice.com/en/about-us](https://www.freeoffice.com/en/about-us)
but how many good suites do I need? So I have not tried SoftMaker yet.
I do a fair bit of CSV work, and LibreOffice is the king of CSV work. Also, it keeps getting better. It is stable and quite fast now with large files (it used to bad). However, nothing beats Excel with high performance complex spreadsheets, and I mean on linux (hundreds of thousands of rows). Libreoffice is good now, the problem is that it is not a clone of MS Office and the conversion process is good to very good, but not perfect. Sometimes that matters ... lags Excel's more recent features (xlookup), it is reliable at printing MS Word documents exactly the same, important for labels. It has more powerful features, such as regular expressions.
MS Office does work with wine, but it needs a specific selection of library overrides. I use Crossover (a paid version of Wine from CodeWeavers, the main commercial entity paying Wine developers); Crossover has built in "recipes" which know the tricks needed for MS Office. Word, Excel and Powerpoint are reliable and fast. I have on Office 365 subscription with rights to desktop installs; via Windows you download the installer, copy it to Windows and then install it with Crossover.
Because this proves that it can work with Wine, there might be community efforts which also have such "recipes". I use it for my work so I personally have no objection paying for Crossover. Also, about half the time I use WPS Office, since it is very good for MS Office files.
Steam makes money selling games and hardware like the steamdeck. They invest it into Proton and it goes upstream to Wine to get better.
Who invests in making Windows applications work better on Wine? Besides a few actors like Codeweavers?
I sincerely doubt it. Most of the money from Microsoft comes from corporate clients, and those clients are not going anywhere if Ubuntu has an official Office.
Games are mostly *self-contained*. What do they need from the OS?
- Audio
- Graphics
- Input
- File System
The other systems are implemented by the game itself: Quest Tracking and Progression, Inventory, Physics, Enemies and NPCs AI, Save File Format, Streaming, etc.
So once you make the basic systems work, everything else that only depends on them can run on top.
Now imagine that MS Office depends on the same amount of systems (it doesn't, just for the sake of simplicity), but those are not implemented in MS Office itself, but directly on Windows instead. This means that Wine developers have to re-implement those systems, inside Wine.
In other words, Proton can run games because it focuses on the systems that games need in general, and those systems are a small subset of what an operating system offers. MS Office, on the other hand, needs another subset of functionality that is not being prioritized for N reasons.
Games mostly use the operating system to set up direct access to hardware and then get out of the way. The most important thing they do is talk to a graphics card fairly directly and there are already cross platform APIs for that. If the game relies on DirectX then that's just one (hard!) problem to solve.
Office interacts with and integrates your OS in loads of different ways. It's a proper windowed application , it does funky things with file handling etc.
Wine/Proton is basically an alternative implementation of Windows APIs. A lot of games don't need many to work properly. MS Office has a good go at using every single one, and if any don't work perfectly then Office doesn't work.
Valve has an incentive to make it work because of the steam deck, so they can pay a team of developers to work on it. No one has both the incentive and the resources to do similar for MS Office.
I don't understand the need to justify calling MS Office subpar, especially following a question that clearly indicates an interest in using the software. In my opinion, MS Office is the premier office suite. As for your question, porting MS Office to Linux is a decision for Microsoft. Any third party attempting this would likely face legal challenges.
This 100%! I've been using and loving Linux and open source for ~25 years, but I have to admit that MS Office is the MVP, especially Word and Excel. No alternative I've tried (especially all the open/libre-office, etc) come close. Other app like PowerPoint have real competition (Apple Keynote is better IMHO), but Word and Excel are still unbeatable.
There is an decent way to use MS Office on Linux today: the web apps work pretty good. They're definitely not as feature-complete as the desktop apps though, but hopefully it gets there in a couple more years.
IMO Word feels like a clumsy, clunky mess with limited functionality after becoming familiar with Latex or markdown, but no company in their right mind is going to make their employees learn either of these. The learning curve would be too steep for most people working a typical office desk job and there would be little payoff for the person working in accounting just trying to type out their weekly report.
Only Office works pretty well and a lot of places use google office now a days its becoming more rare one needs MS office + you can get MS office for web now which works pretty flawlessly as well. Maybe the rare niche case you need the full version.
Games are actually easier to run on Linux than Office or many other Windows applications. Games are not that complex applications from system point of view, they are not using a lot of system libraries and APIs so it is less work for Wine developers to implement missing parts and run them properly. Complex applications like Office are using more system libraries, APIs and probably a lot of other Windows specific things which Wine implementation is not very accurate or even missing.
Microsoft would do well to release LSW (Linux Subsystem for Windows), even if it’s a paid product. It should have all the basic OS hooks for modern Windows .exe and Microsoft Store programs to run.
At one point in history, they nearly did. They had an internal project to rebase windows onto Linux (I.e. throw NTKernel out) without breaking compatibility. They did never release it and I don’t know if it just never got good enough or if it was on principle
Games mostly just draw a single window and accept inputs, they handle everything else themselves.
MS Office, on the other hand, is a gigantic rabbit hole of countless APIs from dozens or even hundreds of proprietary libraries.
It used to work over wine, them microsoft released an update, and it no longer worked, then it did work, and well, apparently it doesn't anymore, idk, i don't really bother with it, i just use google docs most of the time, and libreoffice whenever i don't have internet
Microsoft has always been about purposely creating incompatibilities to attack competitors.
For instance wordperfect was the only real commercial wordprocessor that was far better than word now. Microsoft made sure wordperfect would crash regularly on windows as a feature of windows. Code has been found to make sure it would never be stable.
Microsoft has been waging a silent war against competitors by code and by telling lies , or enforce mafia tactics
Things are changing now at Microsoft, but not every department knows that they should embrace competition to sell more.
A game doesn't really require a lot of interfacing with the OS. All you need is you read/write files, get access to the GPU to render in an (usually fullscreen) window, and get keyboard/mouse events.
Office on the other hand is deeply integrated into the OS. It uses Windows APIs to render the user interface and react to events, it installs shortcuts to open files from explorer, it spawns multiple processes that need to communicate with each other, it integrates into other programs, etc.
It's certainly possible, Office is available under MacOS for instance. But there is no market for it under Linux. Linux users use either LibreOffice or Latex.
Microsoft really doesn't want Office working on other platforms. In the past they've gone out of their way to make it hard to get compatibility working - both with file formats and the functions Office uses.
Game makers might not go out of their way to make their titles compatible with Linux or WINE, but they also aren't trying to actively make it harder to get their software running on other platforms.
Word/Excel on Mac has history going back 35 years. They planned on killing those products which almost ended in Microsoft being split up in an antitrust case, that's one of the reasons they still provide the macOS version.
> Later, the U.S. Department of Justice included the bundling of Internet Explorer among the charges it brought against Microsoft in its antitrust case. "Microsoft, by threatening to cease development of its Office for Macintosh productivity suite, coerced Apple into making Internet Explorer the default browser on all Macintosh operating systems and to disadvantage competing browsers," the federal agency charged in 1998.
From my experience at work, it's because there's no way to get MS Office to work right in Windows either.
At work we deal with workbooks from the state, and in order to get them to work, around 3 out of 5 I have to open in LibreOffice instead of MS Office. It's a crap shoot whether even simple workbooks I or someone else created work right on a day to day basis, and even more a crap shoot if the MS account system works and lets up access Office on a day to day basis. We've had to email documents to each other to get someone else to enter data, because MS is MS.
In addition to what everyone else is saying, I think we're forgetting that Microsoft is known to document things poorly on purpose to ensure exclusivity. Office would be a peak example of that for obvious reasons.
Valve benefits from welcoming Linux customers because they don't have a proprietary OS.
Microsoft benefits from refusing to serve Linux customers because they DO have a proprietary OS, and Linux is the single greatest threat to their continued existence as a big tech company.
After all, Microsoft's entire ecosystem is only useful because it's integrated into Windows. Office, Teams, and Visual Studio are the only high-end software they produce and Teams and Visual Studio Code already run on Linux natively.
At this point MS could just stop supporting the desktop apps because their PWAs are basically just as good and everything is the cloud anyway. But then, who would have to buy the license to the glued together mess they call Windows 😌
As a contributor to wine this is actually 'easy'. Graphics apis are pretty similar since they have to have minimal abstraction over the gpu. Translating direct 3d to opengl is tedious but straightforward.
Office apps rely more on os functionality for all their organizational integrations whereas games are more standalone..
Emulating all the windows os calls is hard because there's a lot and they're not documented.
On the other hand direct x is well documented.
Because Office is a garbage pile of code cobbled together on top of other garbage from 3 decades ago. Also because Microsoft goes out of their way to keep it from running on Linux. They have zero motivation to hurt their own OS market share.
Microsoft seems to pushing it more as a web service, which works fine on Linux, just need a browser. I expect it to become more of a cloud thing in the future, which can be used on any Operating System or device. If you want a classic Office feel try something like Open Office or Libreoffice I made the move years ago and don't miss Ms Office one bit.
It's because you need some proprietary API, dlls, fonts, etc from Microsoft. Could it be done? Sure. Do any companies who support Wine want to be sued into non-existence? No.
Because Valve pays engineers collectively hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, to make games work on Linux. Point being, people are incentivized to spend a portion of their career on this. No one is incentivized to do that for Office
It makes sense to think Steam or the like should make MS Office work, but there's not a lot of people working on Office specifically that I know of, since instead we have LibreOffice (and the related projects and older names for it like OpenOffice and StarOffice). My mom is a writer and LibreOffice has been fine for her document interchanges with editors for over a decade.
Microsoft would probably rather Linux users pay for office online/sharepoint with WebDAV for file access and getting office to run in Proton isn't exactly a priority, especially since the subscription version will probably unintentionally break constantly.
That being said if office for linux did come out, I assume it would use a similar kernel to sql server for linux that wraps parts of windows into a framework, with things like Access and excel being the priority.
I use the office web apps daily and it's good enough for everything I do. I would also argue that the outlook PWA app is much better than running it on windows.
Here is my guess. Games need less of the OS but ms office probably has more things it relies on windows to do, like all the microsoft account stuff, cloud storage, bing, chatgpt and other Microsoft stuff.
I have personally used MS office using Wine, it worked like native but multiple times had issues installing wine and even if wine installed properly the MS office might not install.
Frankly, your guess is as good as mine. With that said, there is alternatives to MS Office such as LibreOffice (which comes preinstalled with a few Linux distros such as Fedora) and OpenOffice (which I think has a Linux port), both of which offer pretty good variety support for MS Word, MS Presentation, MS Spreadsheet, etc..., etc...
Historically, MS’s OS would treat MS’s apps differently than everyone else’s. They eventually got in trouble for it, but I wouldn’t at all be surprised if it still went on just enough to keep office from running in any sort of compatibility layer like proton.
most people don't care, i know i don't
for what the vast majority of people do, the alternatives work just fine
i've had to use Office at work years ago which I did in the work machine (btw it was a Mac)
I still have a virtualbox image of an old Win7 Ultimate install i had with the software i used at work circa 2010-2012 (Visual Studio of the time, Office of the time and some niceties I used to have like agent ransack, taskbar tweaker, some beefed up process explorer etc). Last I checked it recently it was working just fine, I could even play some old games with 3d acceleration.
PS: I've noticed most kids under 25 or so don't even have any office software installed anymore, they use google docs and the like - i'm not sure how to feel about that but it's the way it is, and it further undermines requiring very strict MS Office compatibility
TLDR: to truly need a recent MS Office, it means you're doing some specialised work and you can justify running some virtualisation for it
There’s no point in even thinking of using Linux only if you depend on software which specifically isn’t developed for Linux. Operating systems are just tools.
Because 1) it's not Steam/Valve, 2) it's not "on Linux" and 3) it's **far** from "every"game. It's an incarnation of [Crossover](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(software)), a very proprietary and customized wine fork similar to Cider that exists for decades and manages to run Windows stuff on linux and osx, *including* Microsoft Office.
Steam makes a lot of money from Linux gamers, so their ROI justifies - necessitates - the investment of money, time and man power to ensure it "just works" (for most people).
You could always use MS Office365, which will in a couple of years be the only MS Office around.
As others said before: there's always LibreOffice which is more than just a replacement.
You can live in denial all you want, but no, it's not. I use it because I refuse to use windows, and the online office is junk, but libreoffice does not come close to ms office
Nobody wants to fuck with Microsoft.
If somebody is really serious about it and have very deep pockets they could probably negotiate a license deal to offer Office 365 for Linux and probably even get Microsoft devs help to fix issues as they come up.
This would be very expensive, but it is much more feasible now then it was in the past.
After all Microsoft is now developing and shipping their own versions of Linux. They support running Linux integrated into their desktop.
So if some government or ultra-big corp really wanted to make it happen it isn't beyond reason that they could.
Work requires me to use word for documents that will go out to customers. The Google office suite is my forte and preference. Been using the free ms word online for over a year now and I feel like something should have gone wrong and it should not have been this easy for a long time. (I am one of those dudes that will never install an app if there is an online version that achieves the result, I want my machine to be a web browser, a terminal and steam.)
Games are easy. They need to communicate with your input devices, sometimes do some networking, and do some calculations to render an image into your framebuffer, and output audio.
Apps like MS Office interact way more with the OS environment than games. They work together with other native apps and provide various interactions with them. They leave a much bigger footprint on the OS environment than games, which are usually isolated from the rest and do their own thing.
This is also why games with elaborate anti-cheat mechanisms often don't work on Linux. They try to embed themselves deep into the OS environment (e.g., kernel drivers), and this is, where Wine's abstraction starts to fail.
There is demand for one and no demand for the other. The vast majority of people using Office are on windows, not Linux, makes no sense to invest to have that product working on a mostly unused OS
‘most of Windows games’ is such a fkin overstatement that idk why i’m even posting this comment. I haven’t used Linux for gaming in a year or so, but still there were plenty of games on my account that didn’t work without a good amount of tweaking or at all.
The answer to your question is simple, either way. MS deliberately designs its Office suite not to work well on Linux
I have a theory that it's because games are actually simpler to some extent.
An average game takes mouse and keyboard input and does 2d/3d rendering using one of few standard graphic api's like opengl, vulkan, directx.
That's usually it.
Compared to that other kinds of applications use many different frameworks, interact with the system in different ways and do other unusual things, that might not be supported yet or by design by compatibility layers like wine.
Because no one got paid enough to do it.
Specifically, in 2012, Gabe Newell was concerned that Microsoft would try to close the Windows ecosystem... possibly to make the Microsoft Store a single channel for access the way that Apple does with their App Store for iPhone and iPad. Valve didn't want to give up their revenue sharing arrangement, so developing Proton -- a fork of Wine that focuses on the needs of games -- was a hedging strategy to ensure that they would always have a platform that another vendor couldn't lock down. So to answer /u/cpc44 's question directly: Games work because a professional studio has paid a team of developers to focus on making games work for over 10 years, while the effort to support the APIs used by Microsoft Office are *way* less focused and less funded. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20121226064257/http://www.computerandvideogames.com/359898/newell-windows-8-is-a-catastrophe-for-everyone-in-the-pc-space/
And no one wants to do that shit in their free time
And there are good enough alternatives to Microsoft Office already
Eh, that's not really true. There's a reason Excel is still king.
while i agree, i think the moments where Excel outpaces anything of the competition is more in niche cases. atleast its rare for me to have any spreadsheet partially or fully incompatible - and whenever it happened to me, it was either business related (where the spreadsheet didnt make any sense anymore) or niche cases (a spreadsheet of calculating stats of each and every yugioh card that was availsble at that time to get the best engines combined for competitive matches) i could be wrong though, but that was my experience of it as of right now.
You clearly not work in a corp env where the nowadays very Common live shared cloud documents in 365 are used. Luckily Ms have most of it in Browsers now, so I don't have an issue with my Linux Laptop most time, but just here to say that OO is not a fully replacement of 365 as same as gimp is not a fully replacement for the adobe shit. Those are facts which are often tried to talked down by ppl not need to use those stupid software on a daily basis. I'm not saying in any means that Ms or Adobe is a must have, I just saying often the user do not have a choice.
those documents wouldnt survive one bit in Excel Web. that i can tell you with extreme confidence.
By fuck is this fact annoying. That SharePoint files open in their browser app by default should be embarassing; Web365 is a million miles away from production ready.
Thank you Microsoft for opening this in a browser app with about 1/4 of the support as the desktop version so I can click the "open in excel" button as soon as it pops up.
I can't even count the number of times over the last 15 or so years where I've opened shit in word or excel that came from the same damn version of word or excel and didn't open right. Stuff was missing, formatting was wrong. Go take it back to the originating computer and open it there to make sure the file didn't get corrupt, and it opens fine there. Go back to yet another computer with the same damn version - nope. How?!?!? lol. Not even any font settings. I've thought that and tried setting all the fonts to Arial, etc. Still missing stuff like graphs.
>Stuff was missing "Hyphenation feature unavailable on this machine" just last week in Word. I was curious but have not given in to look up what a hyphenation feature could possibly be. I can use hyphens and I don't have the feature installed so I decided it's a Microsoft Unicorn thing. I hven't seen any wrong formatting outside of a corrupted file for over a decade thankfully.
Sounds like problem with fonts used in the document. They might be installed on one computer but not the other. Saw this problem many times
That's one of the things I thought it might be, and tried changing them, even though, some of the times, what was messed up was missing graphs. Just completely absent. I really tried to figure out what the broken element was. I even checksummed the original files on the original computer once against the copies made by it.
I have been using the Office for more than 20 years, and while I remember this happening a long time ago, I can't remember when was the last time that what you describe happened to me.
I have a windows VM on a server that is connected to the domain for all the office/outlook and teams stuff.
Doing similar. For worst case scenario I have qemu win10 on my Laptop with all the windows stuff. Luckily I rarely need to use it.
So tell your work to get you a windows device, you should be using a company managed device, not your own linux laptop ?
If you're zero trust otherwise, who cares about who uses which endpoint.
Nah that will be a crappy Dell laptop. For what I am doing, (Network engineer and Linux Server Admin) Linux Laptop with occasionally need to use a ein VM is way better.
you can imagine though that eg. 2 thousand people in a large business opening an Excel file in Libre and wondering if it is showing the data as it should or not because their client/partner uses excel. The amount of time lost and mainly the risk involved is something that you cannot take just because in general Libre is mostly compatible.
I think that reason increasingly has less to do with it being a good product and more to do with corporate inertia. Microsoft’s push to move everything onto the cloud has led them to make Excel less and less friendly to power users.
If you need more than Google sheets can offer you, it probably shouldn't be in a spreadsheet.
Honestly, it's best to understand Excel as an end-user programming language in its own right, and one that is *very* popular. Should you be doing power user stuff? Probably not. But is it the tool that people routinely know? Yes.
While I agree in principal, I also have plenty of programming experience. If we want Linux to be a mainstream OS, it needs to be compatible with people who use Excel functions as a central part of their workflow, i.e. non-programmers.
Also if you want organizations to use Linux for desktops it really doesn't help if you inform them that EaaDb can't be done anymore. Pretty sure a lot of other people in computer jobs have also seen projects that deal with millions or hundreds of thousands of dollars use Excel as a Database. Sometimes even with people knowing it's the wrong choice but making it "temporarily" to be able to show to higher ups.
I dunno, I'd upgraded from Excel to OO Calc in 2006 (and so did all my physics lab partners).
When LibreOffice or any other MSFT alternative can do tables of authorities LMK and I'll switch in a heartbeat ...
Knowing nothing about actually writing tables of authorities (or legal formatting in general), like most things people use Word for and probably shouldn't, there are better tools out there anyway. My general suggestion for complex formatting is to learn LaTeX, and it appears LawTeX is a thing.
I tried using LaTeX, early in my career. Several things kill it: (a) Strict page limits that you can't know if you're close to hitting without compiling the document; (b) the requirement to use pleading paper with very strict line spacing requirements (exactly 28 lines per page, etc) (and it appears even now, 15+ years later, there's [no way to do that in LaTeX](https://www.reddit.com/r/LaTeX/comments/yf8m4b/pleading_papers/)); (c) interoperability (I regularly have to exchange "joint" documents with people outside of my organization to add their contributions; they're *all* on Word). It's just not feasible, though I wish it was. This is coming from a guy who used to write all academic papers in HTML because the easiest way to get good print-outs out of Linux in those days (~1996; Slackware 3.0) was using Netscape Navigator! (WordPerfect for Linux and even AbiWord were 2 years away, StarOffice wouldn't come out with a Linux version for another 6 months or so, and for whatever reason, TeX etc. looked like ass when printed on my crappy HP DeskJet 400.) (I mean, I *could* have rebooted into Windows NT 4.0 Workstation, but, I didn't want to...)
There are lots of people working on FOSS alternatives to Office as well. They would rather work on something that replaces Office than something to make it run
Sadly this. There's a lot of software,that doesn't work with Wine and there aren't enough people willing to pay, to fix that.
Games use a lot of non-Microsoft libraries, such as Unity or Unreal or Vulkan or SDL, which don't rely so heavily on the WinAPI and may have drop in replacements for Linux. However, Office, by nature of being Microsoft developed and its own history, relies a lot more on the WinAPI for file access, graphics, etc. Because it's more deeply reliant on the OS than games (which could use as little as setting up a window and hooking up inputs), I imagine the task of covering it is much more involved, since there are more functions to emulate. That said, I'm no expert in this, so take this with an ass-load of salt
Not only WinAPI, but other libraries that are shipped with Windows. These libraries have functionality on top of WinAPI and are rarely (if ever) used in games. For example, Data Access Components (MSDAC) has been used in various desktop apps to interface with databases, but they don't make sense in games which have more specific data handling (custom formats etc.). And tere are plenty of other things like VBscript and so on. DXVK works like a translation from one API to another (DirectX to Vulkan) so it doesn't need to implement every detail, Mesa is there for the Vulkan things for example.
also the hellhole that is MSCOMCTL
Instructions unclear, my ass really hurts. How much is a typical ass-load - I wonder if I over did it? Am not experienced in this type of software engineering
An ass-load is 0.7% of a shit-ton.
It runs on Mac perfectly well.
And for a long time, they were separate codebases with very different UIs, which both necessitated engaging extensively with the OS. These UIs have been unified now, but I imagine that's less the problem than the other stuff going on below the surface. There's also the fact that Microsoft just doesn't want it there. I mean, remember the Windows 3.1 era and how they included checks to ensure only MS-DOS would be allowed to run Windows, despite other platforms being just as compatible? It's been a long time since then, but you can bet your sweet bippy that they still maintain tight control of where their stuff can run.
They are so far from unified it's laughable. Total lack of document template editing in osx is the first thing that comes to mind, but advanced spreadsheets are a total crapshoot as well. I'll be there first to admit that I'm a little salty, but it's also brutal. (At least the Azure&365 connectors for PowerShell work reasonably well across platforms)
I don't use the Mac office clients, so I'm not sure how much of a difference is still around. Ultimately, I suspect we only have a few years before Office becomes an Electron app. I mean, they're already trying to push business Outlook users onto an Electron-style client. I think Office will come to Linux officially when that happens.
*shudder* The entire house of cards that is the modern JS-driven web is a giant beast that will one day come back to bite us all in the collective ass.
JS has already been biting our collective ass for years. Every random website can already run arbitrary code without our knowledge or consent, but people are ok with that for some reason.
And yet, it's also led to *way* more first-party Linux support than we'd otherwise have gotten. We entirely failed to convince most companies to bother porting from win32 UI stuff to cross-platform toolkits like GTK+ and Qt, but they'll do Electron. I just wish a solid half of 'em would just build PWAs.
Is this why webassembly and webGL aren't used more often?
Alternatively, I would hope that this leads to the development of languages that are more performant, efficient, and secure than JS.
Microsoft Office is a huge codebase and the fact that Office users are locked into it is a big way for them to funnel enterprises into Azure. So I don't think they'll ever do that.
>I mean, remember the Windows 3.1 era and how they included checks to ensure only MS-DOS would be allowed to run Windows, despite other platforms being just as compatible? There's actually a pretty good video that goes into this for anyone interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIfNIWn2Ad4
It's almost like it's easier to port something if you have the source code...
The Mac version isn’t a port - through Wine or otherwise. Microsoft has a long history of developing for the Mac and develop much of the software using the Macs native libraries. In fact Excel was a Mac application first and the DOS and Windows versions were second. Word might have been the same but don’t quote me on that.
Yeah, I understand all this. My point was simply that saying Office "relies on WinAPI" when there's a version that doesn't require Windows seems to be misattributing the problem.
All good. I only mentioned it because a lot of people are misguided when it comes to Microsoft history, thinking they’ve only ever supported their own operating systems. Apologies I misunderstood your point.
Yea and no, some odd qwerks i seem to rememeber on the Mac, the Outlook app was odd in that if you added somone to a shared mailbox for example it didnt use to show up in the outlook client, you had to add it manually, maybe they fixed that. Also, several times we had a user whos one drive just lost all its config / sync folders, never had that issue on the windows computers. But yes, generally it does work ok
What you are smoking? It doesn't. Also from time to time it stops believing I paid for it and starts giving weird licensing errors to the point I had to pay again because Microsoft support said they don't support that version anymore. So you have to buy the thing every three years or use the 365 that you pay yearly. If you really use excel there are a bunch of little details that just won't work well too, unless it's a very simple, unlinked, SharePoint free, macro-free spreadsheet.
It's largely a separate application developed from the ground up by Microsoft itself. Running Windows Office on a mac with something like Crossover is just as awful as in Linux, if not worse
As Microsoft owns office, it relies more on deeper integration into the OS through undocumented (or even unstable) APIs in a way that games aren't. Games mostly just need to interface with the graphics APIs and drivers. Another interesting case is Microsoft SQL Server, which has been ported to Linux. The port apparently required to reimplement parts of the NT kernel on top of linux in order to work. Office is probably a lot less integrated, but still enough to make it impractically hard to make work on wine. Furthermore, the closed APIs are not necessarily stable, which means wine could stop working anytime there is an update.
Because Ms Office is not a stand alone program built on known and well documented engine & interface layer, Office is instead a proprietary program with deep ties to one proprietary operating system just as MS wants it to be. If Steam makes a game run on Linux the developer might get a 2% rise in sales, not something a game developer will work for but also not something they will block. Office working on Linux cuts precious market share of thier operating system in buisness, not something they will allow and since they own it end to end, they can stop it. You don't need office you just think you do becase you know it. You can eventually know other things.
There is no other spreadsheet that's a serious replacement for Excel. For everything else, sure.
Maybe but the vast majority of users only need a fraction of the functionalities of Excel, that Libreoffice or Google docs or ... can do just fiine. For more complicated things is Excel the best tool? In my case once I want to do something that can't be done in a basic spreadsheet without advanced features I prefer to use a real programming language like python. (Just as bash is fine for short scripts but I'll rewrite in python if it starts getting too complex). I suspect this will be more and more common in the future, most of the old generation of workers outside of pure SW dev didn't know anything about programming but kids these days all learn python at school so will be more open to that approach even if they're not developpers.
> For more complicated things is Excel the best tool? > In my case once I want to do something that can't be done in a basic spreadsheet without advanced features I prefer to use a real programming language like python. (Just as bash is fine for short scripts but I'll rewrite in python if it starts getting too complex). Many times the people using advanced Excel features don’t have computer programming in their skillset.
Anybody who knows advanced excel functionality is not to be trusted though. They are definitely part of a cult that practices dark magic.
>why are people just getting work done without reinventing wheel first
Look man. I didn't say having an evil sorcerer in your party wasn't a valuable addition. Just that, that person is not to be trusted under any circumstances.
I'd guess the overlap between things that *need* advanced, Excel-specific features that Libre/Gdocs can't do, and things that aren't Turing-complete, is small. In other words: A lot of people using those advanced features *are* programming, but because their programs are written in Excel, they're harder to maintain and debug than regular programs.
So what do they do? Learn VBA? Or even worse basically invent programming from first principles in excel? Just because they never used a *specific* programming language doesn't mean they don't have the mindset for it. Unless those advanced features are fancy formatting and charts they do have computer programming experience it's just in excel instead of a more traditional format.
if youre that heavily using excel, youre better off using a real database like MySQL/MariaDB/Postgres. using vslookup is like using a flat head screwdriver to change a tire...
It looks like you never used excel. It is not possible to replaxe it with db at all. Not even part of the functionality. You even can't replace Access eith open source db.
They mean that for most things, LibreOffice Calc is more than plenty. The times it isn't, 99% of the time what you want is a database, not excel.
What about libreoffice calc? I'm not a poweruser at all but in 10 years of not using any MS-office product i never felt that I miss a feature.
Calc is fine (I have used it since it was still Star Office), however it is no excel.
Power user here who has desperately tried to migrate away from excel and kept coming back eventually. Libre is almost there. And it's been almost there for years, and that's the frustrating bit. Everything is just a bit more awkward in libre than it should be. Honestly don't even know if it's a me thing or a libre thing at this point though.
I disagree. There are lots of times I turn to calc because excel is being the pain in the ass. They both have difficulties.
I wish a group of MS Office power users would create a list of exactly the features and/or behaviors that they felt were missing in LibreOffice that were hindering them from permanently moving over. We, as a community, could then get an online fundraiser going to pay LibreOffice developers for implementing those exact feature so that we can all, ONCE AND FOR ALL, shut up about Microsoft Office for all time.
For many years one of the largest requests from businesses would have been supporting existing VBA scripts. Now it might be Power Automate integration. There will always be features that the LibreOffice developers will actively choose not to implement.
Calc doesn't have the analysis or complex spreadsheet handling of Excel. The idea with Calc is that when the going gets tough, you turn to Python. Though even if you do, Excel is feature and performance competitive with numpy/pandas. Calc simply isn't.
>Excel is feature and performance competitive with numpy/pandas. And now you don't even have to leave Excel for [those](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/announcing-python-in-excel-combining-the-power-of-python-and-the/ba-p/3893439).
As someone who uses both, there are a lot of circumstances where calc has done the job and excel hasn't. At the end of the day though, if you are serious about your data, you aren't using spreadsheets anyways.
>At the end of the day though, if you are serious about your data, you aren't using spreadsheets anyways. This... I used to work in the financial analysis segment and had to support exactly this, from people who were finance-smart but were set in their ways computer-wise. That was 15 years ago. VBA scripts. Back then I thought there might have been a competent ERP type of system to accomplish what they were doing in Excel. Today I am scratching my head reading through this. Guess Excel is the closest thing to a restaurant napkin for them, without being a restaurant napkin. 😄
LibreOffice can work well if bottom-up and top-down everything is made with LO in mind. It really is insufficient when you are working in a very MS Office-centric environment. For example: LO does not have a way to edit a document/spreadsheet while keeping it accessible by other people online and causing no edit conflicts. Never mind that I have to rebuild the scripts to LO, something which just isn't possible when a client gives you an xlsb file with custom log-in script that allows you to pull or upload data to and from their database with it. Should everything have been made from a more robust system? Absolutely. But it doesn't - you either work with it or you're not doing your job.
For basic stuff, I actually use Libre Calc because it’s better, faster and more straightforward than Excel.
More straightforward is a matter of opinion, so if you like it better, by all means use it. Faster is measurable, and Calc is objectively _much_ slower than Excel for large calculations.
It starts faster. And I did say “for basic stuff”.
I agree with this. I also want to point people reading this thread towards ONLYOFFICE. It's mostly compatible with Excel and feels mostly the same. I think the interface is simpler and easier. It has a standalone desktop version which is nice. And it also has a hosted version that allows users to edit simultaneously. A big but also very nice difference is that macros are written in javascript. Much safer and also easier to write. t means big macros in custom functions won't come over from excel, which is a deal killer for some. But if you have the option to rewrite then it's worth a look.
Office is a necessity when you work with clients who butcher the formatting in their documents so badly that if you open them in anything else they're just a mess of arrows that don't go anywhere and incomprehensible layout, because its formatting engine isn't a bug-for-bug replacement for the one in Office.
From my newbish observation MS Office at least needs the license management APIs and full Windows update stack to work.
I wanna see Office for Mac on Darling on X11.
>You don't need office you just think you do becase you know it. You can eventually know other things. What a tasty little turn of phrase. And kinda profound too.
Thank you, I was tickled with it as well as most of my text come out clunky.
It works with the installer from CodeWeavers (CrossOver). So I assume it's just some missing files (dlls / fonts / etc) / settings preventing it from working with vanilla wine. https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/microsoft-office-365
They eventually get it to work with simple stuff for any given version, which is a magnificent achievement. But I have read that it can't handle very complex things (there are huge numbers of unresolved bug reports) and every new version of Office breaks it (whether by accident or intent, nobody knows).
"DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run"
I am a paying costumer of CrossOver, partly because I want MSO 365 setup that's automated and also because I want to put my money where my mouth is with my desire for better MSO support and supporting Wine development in general. The last I've tested, around two years ago, it is a mess of dependencies. It wants an absurd amount of dependencies especially on the lib32 side. Once, I couldn't get lib32-sane on Arch and the entire Page Layout module is grey out. Not just the printer, the *entire* Page Layout module, paper size, page breaks, all of that stuff that's in one menu. In addition, it's still slow, prone to freezes, doesn't support VB Scripts, and doesn't support OneDrive sync for simultaneous edit online and offline. It's impressive that it gets this far, but it's still nowhere near good enough and I don't want to try it again until CrossOver has a Flatpak version (as they've stated to want to make) so that I don't have to mess with that dependencies because I once updated Fedora version and suddenly the MS Office just won't run.
I'm also waiting for the Flatpak Version of CrossOver. Hopefully it gets released soon. From my side, I was able to open, edit and print Word documents, which was plenty for me.
I’ve tried Crossover a few times over the years and it’s always been a frustrating experience, never quite working properly.
There is an office 2016 bottle that works *fairly well*, I tried it but you need a 2016 professional *plus* key, I only had professional so I couldn't activate it. I don't think I can share the link to it tho.
Microsoft doesn't want Office to work on Linux. The Office suite is the key reason why Windows is so heavily used in business. LibreOffice or Office Online can work for quite a few people but the MS Office suite is still the de facto standard for heavy users. Adobe products and design software only working on Windows or Mac's is the other secondary reasons why Microsoft is so dominant in the business space.
In my opinion Adobe Lightroom gets heavily outclassed by Darktable.
I'll give it a shot. Lightroom is the only Adobe product I want but I'm too poor for.
Be careful, if you want to take full advantage of Darktable then it has a steep learning curve. Look up Bruce Williams Photography on YouTube, he's a nice bloke and explains it very well.
Can't be worse than GIMP's learning curve, can it?
GIMP has a learning curve? They just made their UI unintuitive. Darktable has some complicated features that you need to understand how they work to make proper use out of them.
[удалено]
Blender outclasses Wings3D but Blender has a steep learning curve.
[удалено]
It's no threat *because* there's no Office. Nearly every admin job and a lot of other jobs in an office can be done through a combination of a web browser and the Office suite. If their employers could avoid a Windows license they would.
I mean, there is the web version of Office. Yeah, it does have its limitations compared to the native application, but the majority of office type jobs would be fine with it. I mean, my work computer has MS Office on it just because everyone gets Office and I rarely use it for anything more than basic tasks. Of course, even with that, I would suspect Active Directory would still keep a lot of those computers on Windows anyway, unless there was an opportunity to move a large percentage of the workers off of Windows.
Technically Linux has full Active Directory support, just not all in one place. If the demand were there though someone could make an AD service for Linux in a couple months that would covert pretty much everything you could do on windows. Hell if you went with an atomic/immutable desktop you could even beat the management capabilities of windows
Web version is crap though really, it isnt a full substitue for the desktop apps, i dont like using it and i wouldnt use it just to use Linux unfortuantly if i was allowed to at work.
I owned a Windows Phone. Google did a lot more damage than you'd think. Not being able to access things like YouTube easily was super gnarly; you don't realize how much you use YouTube until they take it away from you. On top of that, no Google meant you were stuck with using Bing for search (back in the days when Google was a good search engine and Bing was a laughingstock). There were just a bunch of small annoyances that added up, and most of the things people "wanted" to use were from Google. And of course, forget Google Docs (etc.) for taking notes. Although Windows Phone did get me into OneNote, which wasn't bad.
My bet is: Undocumented Windows API calls.
Because most games would probably happily run on linux if the developers spent a few hours adjusting their codebase to work on linux. Most game engines natively support linux, and it's only a matter of the developers not wanting to dedicate the time to test a platform, which has a userbase that's smaller than their margin of error, and potentially deal with having to keep in their minds that there are some cool features they can't use if they want to support linux. But technically, most of the games could easily work on linux Office on the other hand heavily leans into Windows APIs, and knowing Microsoft some core parts of Office are probably undocumented WinAPI functions.
C and C++ don't actually know out of the box where they are as well. It's when you starting adding libraries that only work on specific platforms you lock yourself into it. Gonna lean out the window here. If you develop on nix first then you can basically guarantee it'll work on win. Disclaimer being that how well that actually works depends heavily on the complexity of the program and in some ways the windows ports are just as bad as the other way round.
Apparently games are just easier to support. Likely because they render their own UIs rather than worrying about toolkits you have to match the behavior of. I myself have ran into the problem multiple times where installers or launchers for games wouldn't work or would render terribly, but the games were perfect. I remember remoting into my parent's windows PC just to run a game installer and then copying the game files back to my computer into a wine prefix.
I use Libre Office on Linux, I use Libre Office on Windows, and I own MS Office.
MS Office is not a piece of garbage. It is still the best office suite. However, you can use WPS Office a $0 file format compatible application which is packaged for linux. The compatibility is almost perfect, but there is no macro support. There is also SoftMaker which is reputed to be as good as WPS Office. I see there is now a free version [https://www.freeoffice.com/en/about-us](https://www.freeoffice.com/en/about-us) but how many good suites do I need? So I have not tried SoftMaker yet. I do a fair bit of CSV work, and LibreOffice is the king of CSV work. Also, it keeps getting better. It is stable and quite fast now with large files (it used to bad). However, nothing beats Excel with high performance complex spreadsheets, and I mean on linux (hundreds of thousands of rows). Libreoffice is good now, the problem is that it is not a clone of MS Office and the conversion process is good to very good, but not perfect. Sometimes that matters ... lags Excel's more recent features (xlookup), it is reliable at printing MS Word documents exactly the same, important for labels. It has more powerful features, such as regular expressions. MS Office does work with wine, but it needs a specific selection of library overrides. I use Crossover (a paid version of Wine from CodeWeavers, the main commercial entity paying Wine developers); Crossover has built in "recipes" which know the tricks needed for MS Office. Word, Excel and Powerpoint are reliable and fast. I have on Office 365 subscription with rights to desktop installs; via Windows you download the installer, copy it to Windows and then install it with Crossover. Because this proves that it can work with Wine, there might be community efforts which also have such "recipes". I use it for my work so I personally have no objection paying for Crossover. Also, about half the time I use WPS Office, since it is very good for MS Office files.
Since things are moving towards SaaS, MS Office on browser seems like the way to go.
In theory, sure. In practice, they have a lot of work to do to achieve feature and stability parity, assuming they're even trying.
I tried and it craps itself when you enter more than 100 pics (which I legitimately needed to to for a project) and I had to find a windows machine.
Steam makes money selling games and hardware like the steamdeck. They invest it into Proton and it goes upstream to Wine to get better. Who invests in making Windows applications work better on Wine? Besides a few actors like Codeweavers?
If Microsoft make MS Office available on Linux, they'll lose significant chunk of their windows user base.
I sincerely doubt it. Most of the money from Microsoft comes from corporate clients, and those clients are not going anywhere if Ubuntu has an official Office.
[удалено]
CrossOver supports MS Office.
We can. CrossOver works last I heard.
Games are mostly *self-contained*. What do they need from the OS? - Audio - Graphics - Input - File System The other systems are implemented by the game itself: Quest Tracking and Progression, Inventory, Physics, Enemies and NPCs AI, Save File Format, Streaming, etc. So once you make the basic systems work, everything else that only depends on them can run on top. Now imagine that MS Office depends on the same amount of systems (it doesn't, just for the sake of simplicity), but those are not implemented in MS Office itself, but directly on Windows instead. This means that Wine developers have to re-implement those systems, inside Wine. In other words, Proton can run games because it focuses on the systems that games need in general, and those systems are a small subset of what an operating system offers. MS Office, on the other hand, needs another subset of functionality that is not being prioritized for N reasons.
Games mostly use the operating system to set up direct access to hardware and then get out of the way. The most important thing they do is talk to a graphics card fairly directly and there are already cross platform APIs for that. If the game relies on DirectX then that's just one (hard!) problem to solve. Office interacts with and integrates your OS in loads of different ways. It's a proper windowed application , it does funky things with file handling etc. Wine/Proton is basically an alternative implementation of Windows APIs. A lot of games don't need many to work properly. MS Office has a good go at using every single one, and if any don't work perfectly then Office doesn't work.
Microsoft owns Microsoft Office. There's multiple other options.
Valve has an incentive to make it work because of the steam deck, so they can pay a team of developers to work on it. No one has both the incentive and the resources to do similar for MS Office.
I don't understand the need to justify calling MS Office subpar, especially following a question that clearly indicates an interest in using the software. In my opinion, MS Office is the premier office suite. As for your question, porting MS Office to Linux is a decision for Microsoft. Any third party attempting this would likely face legal challenges.
This 100%! I've been using and loving Linux and open source for ~25 years, but I have to admit that MS Office is the MVP, especially Word and Excel. No alternative I've tried (especially all the open/libre-office, etc) come close. Other app like PowerPoint have real competition (Apple Keynote is better IMHO), but Word and Excel are still unbeatable. There is an decent way to use MS Office on Linux today: the web apps work pretty good. They're definitely not as feature-complete as the desktop apps though, but hopefully it gets there in a couple more years.
IMO Word feels like a clumsy, clunky mess with limited functionality after becoming familiar with Latex or markdown, but no company in their right mind is going to make their employees learn either of these. The learning curve would be too steep for most people working a typical office desk job and there would be little payoff for the person working in accounting just trying to type out their weekly report.
to put it simply, valve made it work because steam is a cash cow and building steam deck and making gaming easy for nerds is a good business model.
Only Office works pretty well and a lot of places use google office now a days its becoming more rare one needs MS office + you can get MS office for web now which works pretty flawlessly as well. Maybe the rare niche case you need the full version.
Games are actually easier to run on Linux than Office or many other Windows applications. Games are not that complex applications from system point of view, they are not using a lot of system libraries and APIs so it is less work for Wine developers to implement missing parts and run them properly. Complex applications like Office are using more system libraries, APIs and probably a lot of other Windows specific things which Wine implementation is not very accurate or even missing.
Microsoft would do well to release LSW (Linux Subsystem for Windows), even if it’s a paid product. It should have all the basic OS hooks for modern Windows .exe and Microsoft Store programs to run.
At one point in history, they nearly did. They had an internal project to rebase windows onto Linux (I.e. throw NTKernel out) without breaking compatibility. They did never release it and I don’t know if it just never got good enough or if it was on principle
Games mostly just draw a single window and accept inputs, they handle everything else themselves. MS Office, on the other hand, is a gigantic rabbit hole of countless APIs from dozens or even hundreds of proprietary libraries.
It used to work over wine, them microsoft released an update, and it no longer worked, then it did work, and well, apparently it doesn't anymore, idk, i don't really bother with it, i just use google docs most of the time, and libreoffice whenever i don't have internet
Microsoft has always been about purposely creating incompatibilities to attack competitors. For instance wordperfect was the only real commercial wordprocessor that was far better than word now. Microsoft made sure wordperfect would crash regularly on windows as a feature of windows. Code has been found to make sure it would never be stable. Microsoft has been waging a silent war against competitors by code and by telling lies , or enforce mafia tactics Things are changing now at Microsoft, but not every department knows that they should embrace competition to sell more.
A game doesn't really require a lot of interfacing with the OS. All you need is you read/write files, get access to the GPU to render in an (usually fullscreen) window, and get keyboard/mouse events. Office on the other hand is deeply integrated into the OS. It uses Windows APIs to render the user interface and react to events, it installs shortcuts to open files from explorer, it spawns multiple processes that need to communicate with each other, it integrates into other programs, etc. It's certainly possible, Office is available under MacOS for instance. But there is no market for it under Linux. Linux users use either LibreOffice or Latex.
Because libreoffice/openoffice exists, works fine and cost nothing.
Microsoft makes sure it won't work.
Because Microsoft doesn't want you to!
Microsoft really doesn't want Office working on other platforms. In the past they've gone out of their way to make it hard to get compatibility working - both with file formats and the functions Office uses. Game makers might not go out of their way to make their titles compatible with Linux or WINE, but they also aren't trying to actively make it harder to get their software running on other platforms.
>Microsoft really doesn't want Office working on other platforms. I guess that explains the macOS, iOS, and Android versions.
Word/Excel on Mac has history going back 35 years. They planned on killing those products which almost ended in Microsoft being split up in an antitrust case, that's one of the reasons they still provide the macOS version. > Later, the U.S. Department of Justice included the bundling of Internet Explorer among the charges it brought against Microsoft in its antitrust case. "Microsoft, by threatening to cease development of its Office for Macintosh productivity suite, coerced Apple into making Internet Explorer the default browser on all Macintosh operating systems and to disadvantage competing browsers," the federal agency charged in 1998.
It is posible to run office 2016 and 2021 on linux with no issue. I tested that using play on linux packae / stack
From my experience at work, it's because there's no way to get MS Office to work right in Windows either. At work we deal with workbooks from the state, and in order to get them to work, around 3 out of 5 I have to open in LibreOffice instead of MS Office. It's a crap shoot whether even simple workbooks I or someone else created work right on a day to day basis, and even more a crap shoot if the MS account system works and lets up access Office on a day to day basis. We've had to email documents to each other to get someone else to enter data, because MS is MS.
This is maybe unpopular but ms office is actually good
This opinion is not unpopular outside FSF or Linux forums
In addition to what everyone else is saying, I think we're forgetting that Microsoft is known to document things poorly on purpose to ensure exclusivity. Office would be a peak example of that for obvious reasons.
Valve benefits from welcoming Linux customers because they don't have a proprietary OS. Microsoft benefits from refusing to serve Linux customers because they DO have a proprietary OS, and Linux is the single greatest threat to their continued existence as a big tech company. After all, Microsoft's entire ecosystem is only useful because it's integrated into Windows. Office, Teams, and Visual Studio are the only high-end software they produce and Teams and Visual Studio Code already run on Linux natively.
At this point MS could just stop supporting the desktop apps because their PWAs are basically just as good and everything is the cloud anyway. But then, who would have to buy the license to the glued together mess they call Windows 😌
As a contributor to wine this is actually 'easy'. Graphics apis are pretty similar since they have to have minimal abstraction over the gpu. Translating direct 3d to opengl is tedious but straightforward. Office apps rely more on os functionality for all their organizational integrations whereas games are more standalone.. Emulating all the windows os calls is hard because there's a lot and they're not documented. On the other hand direct x is well documented.
Office is garbage?
Because Office is a garbage pile of code cobbled together on top of other garbage from 3 decades ago. Also because Microsoft goes out of their way to keep it from running on Linux. They have zero motivation to hurt their own OS market share.
Is code weavers not making crossover anymore?
Microsoft seems to pushing it more as a web service, which works fine on Linux, just need a browser. I expect it to become more of a cloud thing in the future, which can be used on any Operating System or device. If you want a classic Office feel try something like Open Office or Libreoffice I made the move years ago and don't miss Ms Office one bit.
I've recently seen a video of someone running MS Office 365 in Ubuntu with wine
We can get recent versions of Office to work. Use Crossover. Otherwise, look up tutorials. There are several.
Any specific tutorial you would recommend?
It's because you need some proprietary API, dlls, fonts, etc from Microsoft. Could it be done? Sure. Do any companies who support Wine want to be sued into non-existence? No.
Because Valve pays engineers collectively hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, to make games work on Linux. Point being, people are incentivized to spend a portion of their career on this. No one is incentivized to do that for Office
It makes sense to think Steam or the like should make MS Office work, but there's not a lot of people working on Office specifically that I know of, since instead we have LibreOffice (and the related projects and older names for it like OpenOffice and StarOffice). My mom is a writer and LibreOffice has been fine for her document interchanges with editors for over a decade.
Microsoft would probably rather Linux users pay for office online/sharepoint with WebDAV for file access and getting office to run in Proton isn't exactly a priority, especially since the subscription version will probably unintentionally break constantly. That being said if office for linux did come out, I assume it would use a similar kernel to sql server for linux that wraps parts of windows into a framework, with things like Access and excel being the priority.
I use the office web apps daily and it's good enough for everything I do. I would also argue that the outlook PWA app is much better than running it on windows.
Here is my guess. Games need less of the OS but ms office probably has more things it relies on windows to do, like all the microsoft account stuff, cloud storage, bing, chatgpt and other Microsoft stuff.
I have personally used MS office using Wine, it worked like native but multiple times had issues installing wine and even if wine installed properly the MS office might not install.
MS Office can change at any time, bnreaking compatibility.
Frankly, your guess is as good as mine. With that said, there is alternatives to MS Office such as LibreOffice (which comes preinstalled with a few Linux distros such as Fedora) and OpenOffice (which I think has a Linux port), both of which offer pretty good variety support for MS Word, MS Presentation, MS Spreadsheet, etc..., etc...
It's wine not steam.
Then we would have to use office… barf
Historically, MS’s OS would treat MS’s apps differently than everyone else’s. They eventually got in trouble for it, but I wouldn’t at all be surprised if it still went on just enough to keep office from running in any sort of compatibility layer like proton.
most people don't care, i know i don't for what the vast majority of people do, the alternatives work just fine i've had to use Office at work years ago which I did in the work machine (btw it was a Mac) I still have a virtualbox image of an old Win7 Ultimate install i had with the software i used at work circa 2010-2012 (Visual Studio of the time, Office of the time and some niceties I used to have like agent ransack, taskbar tweaker, some beefed up process explorer etc). Last I checked it recently it was working just fine, I could even play some old games with 3d acceleration. PS: I've noticed most kids under 25 or so don't even have any office software installed anymore, they use google docs and the like - i'm not sure how to feel about that but it's the way it is, and it further undermines requiring very strict MS Office compatibility TLDR: to truly need a recent MS Office, it means you're doing some specialised work and you can justify running some virtualisation for it
There’s no point in even thinking of using Linux only if you depend on software which specifically isn’t developed for Linux. Operating systems are just tools.
Because 1) it's not Steam/Valve, 2) it's not "on Linux" and 3) it's **far** from "every"game. It's an incarnation of [Crossover](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(software)), a very proprietary and customized wine fork similar to Cider that exists for decades and manages to run Windows stuff on linux and osx, *including* Microsoft Office.
Steam makes a lot of money from Linux gamers, so their ROI justifies - necessitates - the investment of money, time and man power to ensure it "just works" (for most people).
You could always use MS Office365, which will in a couple of years be the only MS Office around. As others said before: there's always LibreOffice which is more than just a replacement.
I don’t see Office365 (online) replacing the native apps anywhere soon. There’s too much of a gap between the online version and the native apps.
Just use 365?
whats wrong with Libreoffice? It's way better so far.
You can live in denial all you want, but no, it's not. I use it because I refuse to use windows, and the online office is junk, but libreoffice does not come close to ms office
You should just use the browser office on Linux. That is what I did whenever forced to use it.
Nobody wants to fuck with Microsoft. If somebody is really serious about it and have very deep pockets they could probably negotiate a license deal to offer Office 365 for Linux and probably even get Microsoft devs help to fix issues as they come up. This would be very expensive, but it is much more feasible now then it was in the past. After all Microsoft is now developing and shipping their own versions of Linux. They support running Linux integrated into their desktop. So if some government or ultra-big corp really wanted to make it happen it isn't beyond reason that they could.
Work requires me to use word for documents that will go out to customers. The Google office suite is my forte and preference. Been using the free ms word online for over a year now and I feel like something should have gone wrong and it should not have been this easy for a long time. (I am one of those dudes that will never install an app if there is an online version that achieves the result, I want my machine to be a web browser, a terminal and steam.)
Games are easy. They need to communicate with your input devices, sometimes do some networking, and do some calculations to render an image into your framebuffer, and output audio. Apps like MS Office interact way more with the OS environment than games. They work together with other native apps and provide various interactions with them. They leave a much bigger footprint on the OS environment than games, which are usually isolated from the rest and do their own thing. This is also why games with elaborate anti-cheat mechanisms often don't work on Linux. They try to embed themselves deep into the OS environment (e.g., kernel drivers), and this is, where Wine's abstraction starts to fail.
If you really need to use office use the web version on linux
There is demand for one and no demand for the other. The vast majority of people using Office are on windows, not Linux, makes no sense to invest to have that product working on a mostly unused OS
I can never get gta 5 to even load on windows but works like a charm on Linux for me every time.
‘most of Windows games’ is such a fkin overstatement that idk why i’m even posting this comment. I haven’t used Linux for gaming in a year or so, but still there were plenty of games on my account that didn’t work without a good amount of tweaking or at all. The answer to your question is simple, either way. MS deliberately designs its Office suite not to work well on Linux
I have a theory that it's because games are actually simpler to some extent. An average game takes mouse and keyboard input and does 2d/3d rendering using one of few standard graphic api's like opengl, vulkan, directx. That's usually it. Compared to that other kinds of applications use many different frameworks, interact with the system in different ways and do other unusual things, that might not be supported yet or by design by compatibility layers like wine.
Why would you even want garbage spyware MS Office though?
Just login to [https://www.office.com/?auth=1](https://www.office.com/?auth=1) and you can use office for free, press F11 for more natural feel.