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Wine 7.0

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Re: Wine 7.0

#31

Post by HeckFeck »

nudpiedo wrote: post #6
HeckFeck wrote: post #3

I recently used Wine to run Office 97 on Debian, just for old time's sake. I ended up liking it so much that I now use it for my word processing and spreadsheet tasks. This classic version is feature complete to me. Wine ensures it lives on, long past its support date and on an alien operating system. And clippit says hello! Screenshot for the curious: https://imgur.com/a/GmVUAfC It shows Word 97 on Linux editing a l…

So interesting… does it work well with modern word documents? I don’t expect it to run docx but somehow I think it might be better than open office in some aspects

It fares quite well, actually. Here's a screenshot:

https://imgur.com/a/GmVUAfC

I converted my dissertation from Docx to Doc using LibreOffice Writer. It opened in Word 97 almost identically (some page breaks notwithstanding). In my dissertation I had a screenshot with some text boxes and arrows floating over it. Good old Word 97 rendered it perfectly, position, formatting, the works. To complete the picture, after opening my dissertation, Clippit looks suitably bored.

And on Office97 running Docx, funny you mention that. While there is no official way, there are those in this thread who have got the MS FileFormatConverters to work:

https://msfn.org/board/topic/133124-ms-office-2007-compatibi...

When I have a spare weekend, I'm going to try this in my Wine'd setup and see how far I get. The results will become a blog post.

Re: Wine 7.0

#32

Post by stuartd »

HeckFeck wrote: post #11
mongol wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How well does it run?

Excel, Word and PowerPoint run as well as they did on Windows. All the main functionality is very stable. Wine even integrated the icons and mime-types into my DE. It is only very occasionally I hit any critical error. It has only happened when trying something obscure, like "Microsoft Maps for Excel". I haven't tried Outlook 97 yet. But poor old Access won't even get off the ground. I'm guessing due to some ODBC dri…

Outlook 97 was the last decent version (and I think the last version to fully support Lookout, whose ability to index public folders before people thought ACLs were necessary resulted in some interesting discoveries).

Then again I have (reasonably) positive memories of MS-Mail. The version of desktop Outlook I have to use (2016?) is a horrible buggy mess.

Re: Wine 7.0

#33

Post by Taywee »

idiot900 wrote: post #20
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, .doc might be the second worst format ever invented (second to PDF). It is a proprietary, binary only format for storing text documents. Who thought that was a good idea?

It's an artifact of a time when RAM was extremely expensive and CPUs were slow. Dumping the in-memory binary representation to a disk was apparently the logical choice at the time.

Too bad SQLite didn't exist at the time. It would be a pretty good candidate for something like that without eating bogs of memory for large documents.

To be fair to the Office team of the day, when your company also develops the compiler and can guarantee the safety of writing and loading raw structures under specific constraints (even in ways that violate programming language standards), it's not too bad of an idea. Not that it's the greatest, as even then there were certainly better ways of doing it, but the landscape of serialization wasn't as nice as it is now.

Re: Wine 7.0

#34

Post by lillecarl »

kup0 wrote: post #7

Wow, an incredible amount of work/updates in this version. So glad to see a project like this continue moving forward in significant ways and I hope that these improvements bode well for things like Proton

I think it might be the other way around, Valve(proton) improves wine. Since they(valve) started working on game compatibility both wine, and dxvk has gotten a lot of love. Which continues to show that "real" enterprise investments are needed to advance some complex software, be it open source or not. Everything can't be done on a hobbyist basis.

Re: Wine 7.0

#35

Post by HeckFeck »

mongol wrote: post #19
HeckFeck wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel, Word and PowerPoint run as well as they did on Windows. All the main functionality is very stable. Wine even integrated the icons and mime-types into my DE. It is only very occasionally I hit any critical error. It has only happened when trying something obscure, like "Microsoft Maps for Excel". I haven't tried Outlook 97 yet. But poor old Access won't even get off the ground. I'm guessing due to some ODBC dri…

Interesting. My main use case for using Word would be for my CV. Since I don't want it to render a single bit different than on a recruiting manager's screen. Unfortunately PDF still seems to be a bit of a disadvantage in some cases.

If you install modern fonts and get busy with the drawing tools, you can produce a modern styled CV. I would say the chances are good if you made a modern one and saved it as a .doc it would open identically in modern Word. (Though, I have already some ideas for a blog post on this, I might try this scenario too and see what modern Word makes of it!)

I actually used Word 97 to write a report for university. I switched Arial for Calibri and they were none the wiser.

Re: Wine 7.0

#36

Post by nopenopenopeno »

loosescrews wrote: post #23
ogogmad wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What modern MS Office features are missing from '97 but still useful? I'm thinking you won't be able to write formulas using Latex. There's also a 32-bit limit for the amount of memory a program can use.

Crash recovery OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice always used to do this much better than Microsoft, but my understanding is that Microsoft has made more of an effort more recently. It is also useful if the program gets unexpectedly closed (for example by a reboot).

I’m not so sure. I lost a day of school work in November because Word crashed and I wasn’t syncing the file to the cloud. It seems you need to use the cloud service for decent crash recovery.

Re: Wine 7.0

#37

Post by lucb1e »

mongol wrote: post #19
HeckFeck wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel, Word and PowerPoint run as well as they did on Windows. All the main functionality is very stable. Wine even integrated the icons and mime-types into my DE. It is only very occasionally I hit any critical error. It has only happened when trying something obscure, like "Microsoft Maps for Excel". I haven't tried Outlook 97 yet. But poor old Access won't even get off the ground. I'm guessing due to some ODBC dri…

Interesting. My main use case for using Word would be for my CV. Since I don't want it to render a single bit different than on a recruiting manager's screen. Unfortunately PDF still seems to be a bit of a disadvantage in some cases.

I have never heard anyone have problems with a PDF CV. If that's a disqualification reason... I don't know.

This is speaking of IT of course; if you are talking to a small business doing woodworking or whatever, all bets are off on what tech they can and cannot handle. I'd still bet on PDF more than doc(x), though, since maybe they don't have an expensive Word license but PDF should render in browsers.

Re: Wine 7.0

#40

Post by lillecarl »

melissalobos wrote: post #24

> Once the remaining modules are converted to PE, this will make it possible to run 32-bit applications without installing 32-bit Unix libraries. That sounds really amazing, I can't wait. That will really simplify using 32bit windows programs on a 64 bit OS.

Crossover has had this feature for awhile[0]

0: https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/jwhite/2019/12/10/celebrati...

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