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Comment by notfed | Hacker News Reader

> Thesis: We should create a distro of Linux that runs Windows binaries by default via Wine.

On Debian you're one package away:

    sudo apt install wine-binfmt

Otherwise you're still pretty close:

    echo 'none /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc defaults 0 0' >> /etc/fstab
    mount -a
    echo ':DOSWin:M::MZ::/usr/bin/wine:' > /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register

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This is great! Someone else mentioned binfmt_misc. I didn't know about that.

The next step is to isolate the Windows applications: you could use different WINEPREFIX, but I think the better way is to do it like android: one "user" per application.

It's not just to prevent applications to read other applications files, but also to firewall each application individually

For example, if you don't want the application you've mapped to user id 1001 to have any networking, use iptables with '-m owner --uid-owner 1001 -j DROP'

I moved from Windows to Linux a few years ago, I have a few Windows apps I still love a lot (mostly Word and Excel) and thanks to wine I will always be able to use them.

They are also extremely fast: cold starting Word (or Excel) on my laptop takes less than a second, and use far less RAM

Personally, I'd rather purchase a few shrink wrapped old versions of Office from ebay than bother with LibreOffice, Abiword or the online version of Office.

EDIT: I can't find the old recording I made showing how fast it was, but here's what it looks like on my hypland desktop: you can see in btop it doesn't take much resources https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/11w3zzj/hyprland_...

What would be the latest usable office version recommended for this?

This is really interesting.

I thought it was impossible to run newer versions of Office on Linux.

Myself I often prefer LibreOffice, but more options are more options!

Office 2013, last non Click2Run version, worked wonderfully on Wine few years ago

When I did my tests, Office 2007 and 2010 were the most stable

I will try Office 2013 (I'd like a version that works well in wine64!)

I don't have the specific setup archived, but I believe my basis for it was a script included in winetricks at the time which installed Office 2013 professional based on offline 2013 proplus 32bit iso.

WineHQ reports that installer for 2013 64bit is "gold", but apps required few tweaks to be applied and Access sometimes failed.

Generally seems 2013-2016 era works on wine per few applications I checked

Lutris creates dedicated wine prefixes for the applications/games, so you can use it directly. A lot of apps are also installable with some patches provided by Lutris itself

> The next step is to isolate the Windows applications: you could use different WINEPREFIX,

In case you're not aware, wine prefixes each use their own settings, but are not isolated from one another.

https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/FAQ#how-good-is-...

> but I think the better way is to do it like android: one "user" per application.

This would help somewhat, assuming you don't run them all in one user's X session. On Linux, some desktop environments have a "switch user" action to start a separate desktop session running as another user on another virtual console. You can switch between them with Control+Alt+F2, etc.

> In case you're not aware, wine prefixes each use their own settings, but are not isolated from one another.

That's a great point!

I'm aware, which is why recommend instead that wine apps should each be run under a different userid: I don't want any given app to have access to anything that it doesn't absolutely need

> This would help somewhat, assuming you don't run them all in one user's X session

When I start a given wine app, the script starting it allows this user id to render on my Xwayland

It is not as secure as running each on its own X session, but wayland compositors can offer more isolation as needed.

> It's not just to prevent applications to read other applications files, but also to firewall each application individually

Why would one want to prevent applications from reading other applications' files?

We're talking about running desktop applications designed for an OS that isn't built around any concept of application isolation, and for which using a common filesystem is a primary mechanism of interoperability.

> Why would one want to prevent applications from reading other applications' files?

Because I can, and because I don't trust Windows application to be secure.

Thanks to that, I have no problem running 15 year old office software: even if I knew it was malicious, I also know there's nothing it can do without network access, without file access, and with resources constrains (so it can't even cause a denial of service, except to itself).

In the worst case, I guess it could try to erase its own files? (but it would then be restored from an image on the next run, and I would keep going)

> I have no problem running 15 year old office software: even if I knew it was malicious, I also know there's nothing it can do without network access, without file access

Great. Except... WTF can you do with an office application that can't read or write files?

Yeah, that has been the default for a lot of Linux distributions for quite some time now (if you install wine).

not sure I want my parents to be able to double click Windows binaries and have them execute with their privs

My parents can't do that. They're on macOS.

Wine bottler works well for that.

Does wine and wine bottler work on the new Apple silicon macs? Maybe for the old intel machines it does but not quite sure for the new macs though.

Yeah, it does! You probably need Rosetta 2 installed first though.

Is it just me or wine needs a bit more polish? Dialogs and menus are rendered with some weird microscopic font. GDI text rendering seemingly doesn't use font fallbacks, so even something like Scintilla or ebook reader don't quite work under wine.

Many commonly used Windows fonts are licensed under proprietary terms, preventing their inclusion with Wine.

Winetricks[1] can be used to acquire and install a set of default fonts directly from Microsoft.

Furthermore, Windows font fallback differs substantially from that of Linux and similar systems, which generally utilize Fontconfig and FreeType with font relationships defined in configuration files. In contrast, Windows (and consequently Wine) employs a font linking mechanism[2]. Windows handles font linking natively, whereas Wine requires manual registry configuration[3].

[1] https://github.com/Winetricks/winetricks

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/fonts-layout...

[3] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29028964/font-recognitio...

Wine should come with fonts with the same metrics as the proprietary ones. Note that while the font file is copyrighted, the letterforms themselves are free to copy. We already had the DejaVu project recreate equivalents of existing fonts, no reason we can't have the same for the Segoe and Calibri families.

I'm more interested in font fallback that works elsewhere in linux. Rendering doesn't match anyway, so metrics isn't very useful.

I installed windows fonts. AIU it's insufficient?

Doesn't wine delegate rendering to FreeType? Might as well delegate font fallback to FreeType.

> Is it just me or wine needs a bit more polish? Dialogs and menus are rendered with some weird microscopic font.

It's just you. I set up the DPI and high res option to run old Office apps, and they have very nice fonts both on my 2k laptop 4k screen.

Try `xprop -root -f _XWAYLAND_GLOBAL_OUTPUT_SCALE 32c -set _XWAYLAND_GLOBAL_OUTPUT_SCALE 2`

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