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Comment by Onavo | Hacker News Reader

What about the most difficult game of all, Microsoft Office?

You'll need to wait for Wine to be ported to Windows for that one!

wut lol

This wasn't a joke. It is well-known that Wine is the best and the most stable implementation of the Win32 API out there (closely followed by ReactOS).

It's ported. WineD3D.

This is actually really easy, I've had an abliterated Qwen 3.8 FN working on it.

Current Wine just needs a couple of fixes from upstream libxml2 to be able to use the Retail C2R (Click-To-Run) installer, then the apps themselves work fine with a few Direct2D patches (see the effort to get Paint.NET running).

The real issue is that getting activation (even using MAS tooling) working requires a real Windows kernel running for the Warbird-protected activation system, after two weeks I gave up, 99% of my MSO needs are provided by Artcraft now anyway...

Surely the activation thing can be cracked? People used to do this all the time not so long ago.

If you don’t need the newest version then volume licensed 2016 the last one which can be installed without activation

Most tools rely on functioning Windows crypto, which was more complicated than I was willing to delve into to replicate. It probably can be done, and the Warbird source was partially leaked a while ago.

Vibecoded wine activation fix was posted here a week ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746401

Yup, that will do for 0365 and volume licensing, not the standard retail installers though.

Hey, modern versions of Excel have a GPU-accelerated computation engine.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4aRTR6uE9PE, not even modern, it's been there for years.

I would've checked it, if their Office 365... sorry... COPILOT OFFICE... wasn't such a problem to install and test. Notepad++ is enough.

I think the canonical name is MS Copilot for Copilot.

Did you know MS Copilot can now be driven by Github Copilot Harness?

As far as I can tell it's actually Office 365 Copilot for Windows 11 with Copilot, for Copilot+ PCs.

Microsfot Office 365 Copilot for Microsoft Windows 11 with Microsoft Copilot, for Microsfot Copilot+ PCs brought to you by Microsoft Office 365 Copilot for Microsfot Windows 11 with Microsfot Copilot, for Microsfot Copilot+ PCs.

It's Microsoft 365 Copilot ;)

with CoPilot

Whoa, whoa, whoa, stop right there, Evel Knievel.

Yeah I tried that game once it's not for me, I heard the old boss tried to EOL civilization as we know it!

Have they finally got Windows 7 era Paint working yet?

Luckily(?) Office is browser based now.

I mean... You can open Office documents in the browser, but for anything beyond basic tasks it's not even close.

I honestly thought there wasn't even an offline installer anymore, and office.com was the only way to open documents in office these days.

The typical Office installer is a small bootstrapper that requires an Internet connection to download required files, but applications themselves are native and work offline (some features and applications use web tech for UI, of course).

Subscription-based licensing requires periodic check-ins, but perpetual product key-based licensing is available, though compared to the subscription versions, the release cadence for new features is slow.

The online component of traditional apps like Excel works best as a means for sharing documents, with the web UIs useful for reading and light editing, and the same documents fully editable in the native apps.

For most users it is enough. I know a number of companies that nowadays only provides the basic office365 license to their employees (which disable access to desktop apps) for cost saving reasons. They only provide the full license to a small subset of administrative users who are totally irrelevant in an OpenBSD related discussion as they would use windows or MacOS desktop anyway.

its not enough tho. because even the most basic of users still need to open and edit files from advanced users.

recent only office builds are not quite there, but far superior to office Web.

You could try Age of Empires, its menus have the same charm.

(Its presentation is so stiff that I refused to play it - it's supposedly a very good game, but I just couldn't bear playing what felt like MS Office)

I'm having a blast with AoE I on Linux, in this case the Definitive Edition. I don't think it looks like Office though ;) But what is true, it's tricky to get running on WINE. With Proton which I use the configuration works by default though IIRC.

There was a whole era of mid '90s Microsoft games where they were still competing with "Exit to DOS to get the best game experience" so they went out of their way to make sure you were aware you were running in Windows while playing their games. Aside from the early Age of Empires games I also recall the "Madness" family of racing games had different takes on the same idea from a variety of different developers. I actually just reinstalled Monster Truck Madness 1 the other day and have been working my way through trying to bodge it in to being an acceptable experience for this exact reason. The game itself runs fine but the UI does a lot of weird things that may have worked on Windows 9x with a low-res CRT but are very annoying on a modern system.

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