CrossOver 17.0 Released, Lets You Run Microsoft Office 2016 On Linux

[Nth_man]

> MS Office has become industry standard for whatever reason [...]

A standard has to be public, known by all, etc. but Windows and Office are privative, closed programs, treated like secrets.

They are not standards, they are just dominating programs.

[wdb974]

if what you said was at least 50% true people would stop paying 100++++ $ to use office and would start using the free libreoffice since only an idiot would pay to get inferior service that can easily be found elsewhere for free (And you dont even have to jumb to linux to have libreoffice)

You're forgetting that price is not the only metric. A lot of people simply don't want to change, or at least not change too much (i.e. it's okay if Windows changes their UX, as long as it's still like the old Windows in certain areas). Those people resisting change are willing to either fork out the money or look for a pirated version.

Last but not least even in cases where we see great adoption of libre office (like in the municipality of munich) we now see that they decide to drop it as well as linux because of the many issues, issues I suspect are mostly caused because of libreoffice which is the no1 software they use in their line of work and less because of other parts related to linux.

Funny you say that: the French ministry of Education advises schools to use LibreOffice, and that's actually what French schools do.

I my self face problems frequently every month some I can fix with workarounds some I can not fix thats the bottom line...

Certain you can elaborate on the matter.

[Min1123]

Hooray! We got immensely off track discussing whether or not MS Office is necessary. Ask your HR or your CFO and their subordinates if it's necessary, after they get done staring at you like you have three heads that are arguing with each other, they'll tell you they can't do without it.

In the meantime, Crossover was on sale over at Wccftech, so I bought a license. You plug the code into the trial edition to register it. I'm using it from the BIN version under ARCH Linux, and it appears to be able to install packages using pacman (Arch's default package manager) quite nicely for its dependencies.

That being said, it does not JUST work. WINE has the support for WINEPREFIX, which allows you to do multiple different "installs" of Windows to represent different versions and installs, each with their own C:\ drive as a directory. Crossover refers to these as bottles. It appears that you have to set hardware graphics acceleration (such as for games) by checking the "Performance Enhanced Graphics" on a per bottle basis, otherwise software rendering is used via MESA (I think).

I also bought an Office 365 Personal subscription from Microsoft. You cannot get an Office key or a download from this. I had them refund it and purchased Office 2016 (they also assured me that people wanted Office under Linux and they were working on it for some reason). By using the office key and https://setup.office.com/ I was able to select to download an IMG file, which is actually an ISO file. I mounted that on the loopback and attempted an install. The attempt was quite streamlined in that Crossover downloaded and installed all the fonts, the .NET frameworks necessary, and the MSXML6 library, but the MS Office installer then fails and says that something went wrong and it cannot install, then quits out.

Additionally it appears that they only attempt to install as a 32-bit Windows 7 executable right now. Maybe a better "recipe" will be released later that works for me, but for right now this doesn't work.

[deant]

All and all sayd - LibreOffice is PERFECT for the price you pay! I have small company that relies on LO and it never failed me. Yes I dont need very powerful exel/calc features and thats why I am happy for what it gives.