Hey Home-labbers/ self hosters.
This weekend my 10 year old processing machine finally bit the dust (RIP 🗿 💀 ; old system76 laptop, won’t even post, not the topic of this thread but if you’ve got ideas, I’m all ears), and as part of figuring out what happened and coming to the realization its time for a new machine. And as part of getting/ pricing a new machine (not looking forward to the consequences of the RAM-pocalypse), I’ve been reviewing/ thinking about the “structure” of what we as a household currently use our self-hosted/ home-labbed system for.
Myself and my partner are researchers, and as such, we regularly collaborate/ work together on manuscripts, and the reality is, we rely on windows because we’re also collaborating with other authors who also rely on MS word to write in. Now I’m a 100% FOSS advocate, but this is a sticking point my partner has had, and I agree with them, at least in practice that realistically, we need a windows machine laying around specifically for this one, particular use case.
Now my thinking here is to use proxmox to spin up a windows machine as a VM, something we can remote into. Is there any best practice for something like this? How would this work with licensing? I personally haven’t installed windows on something since like windows 7, and I know they’ve enshittified beyond recognition.
I personally don’t want windows on my machines. But realistically, I recognize its necessity for this one particular use case. Thoughts?
I would go with OnlyOffice, I’ve used it before and it seems to handle MS Office files a bit nicer than LibreOffice. I personally use LibreOffice, but it does sometimes burn me when an formatting issue pops up (worst example was a presentation where I set a partially transparent background image which MS somehow interpreted as making all the images transparent, ruining the legibility of the images!)
Someone has already suggested MS Office for web, but that a) requires a stable online connection and b) the web apps by Microsoft are, in a few words, complete ass. Everything loads ridiculously slowly, and formatting is inconsistent in my experience (think stuff like line spacing, font sizes). I really dislike editing on Word on Web, and in my old school, we used Microsoft Teams which just chugs and takes a good while to load anything. Why Microsoft can’t figure out how to make a decently performing web app I have no idea.
Kasm, you only need kasm.
It is a docker engine with the streaming already incorporates. Try that.
It is true that it relies in wine, so perhaps you will need to experiment a bit and pin down a specific wine version. But if I recall correctly I saw an old version of ms office running in wine
If you have the available resources, you could check out Microsoft office online. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/officeonlineserver/office-online-server
This can also be integrated with nextcloud afaik
Just use the web version? i’ve been doing that on my linux desktop for over a year, works just fine.
This, I worked at one of the most stickler for windows workplace for a while and every web office thing worked. The most trouble I had is with teams videos, but that is only because the h264 codec download link was broken, unrelated to Microsoft or Linux. I used Linux Mint Cinnamon and everything was fine.
If the only thing you need is not even the whole Office suite but just a Word processor (and not even any particular version) and since you’ll be remoting to it for the graphical access, you don’t need to spin up a whole Windows VM for that. You can just spin up something with Wine and install the Word component from Office 2013 on that (I’d say Office 2013 at most; you might be able to get away with Office 2007 but I wouldn’t recommend it).
Better yet, Libre Office. Fully compatible with MS formats plus ODF (which Microsoft now supports too btw)
To be fair, and this is coming to someone who is fully sold on LibreOffice and hosts Collabera, the two word processors can open each other’s documents, but cannot produce identical outputs for the same files.
For 99.99% of things switching between the two is going to be just fine, but every once in awhile that 0.01% will really bite you, especially if it is something important such as equations which I have seen first hand don’t properly migrate to LibreOffice.
I can understand the point that Word is needed for producing some borked, glitched, eldritch formatting that 99% of people expect as correct because Office is that much widespread and has trained people to be Wrong on the Internet; and in that case yeah I would still recommend running a(n older version of!) Office just so that you can process (and test) that you are producing what is expected in the exchange.
It’s curious actually. While LO compatibility has improved, I don’t think anything close to an umbrella “Imitate Word [$VERSION] Glitches” option has ever been added or even considered for LO? How about the other Word imitators? Can eg.: WPS or Calligra replicate Microslop idosyncracies? Because if so, running those would be better than running Office on a remote.
Another option is a windows VM and then run sunshine and moonlight to stream word, it would give you the feeling of running office without leaving your Linux desktop
So its not Word for me, but some manufacturer specific applications that dont play well in Wine or other scenarios.
So I start the VM when I need it, use the app I need, shut it back down. The VM has no internet access, only a designated VLAN with no outbound, and any documents going to or from I use a thumb drive. Excessive, yeah, but its how things work for me.
So I start the VM when I need it, use the app I need, shut it back down. The VM has no internet access, only a designated VLAN with no outbound, and any documents going to or from I use a thumb drive. Excessive, yeah, but its how things work for me.
This was my thinking, but office suite, and the documents would get saved to the NAS. How do you manage it as a VM? Are you using proxmox or similar? Do you use a setup script of somekind? What version of microsoft? Keys?
- Proxmox
- rufus to bypass some silly MS stuff, bypass online user requirements, etc
- https://massgrave.dev/
I’m using windows 10 mostly, but I have another one made recently for win 11 because of another stupid manufacturer with stupid requirements.
Once I made the first VM, I made a clone. The clone is what gets the software installation, the original just stays stored on my NAS so I can clone again as stupid manufacturers distribute stupid software that requires windows. I name each VM based on the app its going to run.
Some are a suite of apps and companion applications, some are just a singular application.
Op, This is the best answer. I’ve set up a Windows server using this method. I was blown away by how easy proxmox makes the whole thing.
I use rust desk too btw when I need to remote on for maintenance, etc.
Do you have a hotmail or live account? You can use the free web version of Word that comes with those.
No… but we do need to be able to access all features of document composition. I’ve never used the free web version. We’re pretty hung up on doing things locally, on our compute, without having to have access to the broader internet.
I have a Windows 11 VM running in Proxmox. It works fine. I put a desktop with a Windows license in the cluster, passed the hardware ID into the VM, it didn’t work, so I hollered at an MS rep for a bit and they activated it for me. I don’t use it for much, but it works.
Have you tried onlyoffice? https://www.onlyoffice.com/ There is an offline and selfhosted version, and I found it has better compatibility with ms office than libreoffice.
I will consider this. I don’t have a problem paying for software. So this seems potentially viable. It also seems potentially un/under tested for my use case. I really can-not have the situation where things dont basically “just work” with regards to document collaboration.
They hide it on their website very well, but it’s free as beer and freedom, only some enterprise features are behind a paywall. Maybe this is a better link: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE#-get-started
Working in Remote Desktop for an extended amount of time is no fun. It’s possible, but you need the right version of windows and office to do that.
I wouldn’t want to rely on complex solutions like that for an essential for work. Now you have to administrate your local computer and the remote server. You also rely on a bunch of things going right to be able to use it from on the go: Internet connection on the go that doesn’t filter Remote Desktop, Home Internet connection, proxmox configuration and updates being okay. If you want to add a VPN on top, you get more possible failure points
So run a windows VM directly on your Linux machine. No need to make it more complicated. At least then you don’t depend on a working internet connection.
Alternatively try to run MS Word using WINE on Linux. This might work or break randomly.
If you don’t want to buy a license for office or windows use these scripts.
You really seem to need MS Office. It’s not necessary to make your life harder by building complex solutions. Run windows if it makes your life easier.
Other alternative: buy an Apple device and run MS Office for Mac. That’s the only reliable way to use it without windows.
Adding on to this, if you will run your VM locally, try WinBoat.
It handles installing Windows for you, integrates the filesystem and uses RDP to show the app windows, so you can use them side-by-side your Linux apps instead of having to always look at the full Windows Desktop.
Why not go full outside of office variants and use something like hedgedoc? It’s collaborative and markdown oriented. Another easy solution (it’s just a docker container) but needs more resources could be nextcloud-aio which has collabora out of the box.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Git Popular version control system, primarily for code NAS Network-Attached Storage VPN Virtual Private Network
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
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I have Windows in my environment, and I still just use LibreOffice. Now, I’m not into huge, complex excel spreadsheets so I can’t speak to that, but LibreOffice ticks all my boxes. It has a Windows app, and comes as a flatpak, snap, appimage, there’s even a portable edition as well.
Yeah. I use LibreOffice for everything but my professional writing. I can’t use it for that. It simply doesn’t play nice in a manner I can rely on for professional collaboration when everyone else is using either native microsoft office or office on apple.
If I lived in a world where everyone was on libreoffice, it probably would be fine. And I don’t blame LO for the issue, I think MS specifically makes their product hard to cooperate with. But that doesn’t resolve the issue of passing drafts back and forth with collaborators.
It simply doesn’t play nice in a manner I can rely on for professional collaboration when everyone else is using either native microsoft office or office on apple.
If you don’t mind unpacking that for my own edification, what exactly does it do or don’t do? Does it not decode the data properly/same?
Passing versions back and forth with comments and track changes. Basic details around formatting. Again, I don’t blame LO, I blame MS, but its simply more straightfoward to work in native office.
Could you manage a windows VM for Office?
Is Word mandatory or is Word compatible good enough ?
Because LibreOffice is pretty good, you could even push it further with pandoc, inputting markdown and outputting word documents.
Otherwise, as others suggested, Wine with an older Office version should do the trick
They likely need to track changes, which look and act weird when using LO on ms docs.
Fair, markdown, git and pandoc could work but, it might be too big of a jump for someone used to Word
This isn’t an option for op, they’re collaborating with others for work, so they can’t change the involvement of MS.
