Microsoft 365 on Linux via umu + GE-Proton (Nix flake)

Microsoft 365 (click-to-run Office) famously does not work on stock Wine. This flake is a best-effort attempt to run it through umu-launcher with GE-Proton (the Wine build that Valve/GloriousEggroll ship for games) instead, with the Bottles project's ProtoSoda Wine core available as a second runner. It packages nothing from Microsoft: the Office Deployment Tool and Office itself are downloaded at install time by the ms365 script. You need a Microsoft 365 licence to sign in.

Where the recipe comes from

• A February 2026 report in the Bottles tracker of Office 365 x64 running on Wine 10.20 with corefonts msxml6 riched20 gdiplus, the Office Deployment Tool and a couple of DLL copies.
• The classic ruados / eylenburg Office-on-Wine notes (Direct2D registry tweak, copying the AppvIsvSubsystems* and C2R* DLLs next to the Office binaries).
• The September 2026 Bottles announcement that Microsoft 365 installs, signs in (with 2FA) and runs Word on their Soda 11 Wine core in a Windows 10 prefix. GE-Proton 11 is the same Wine 11 bleeding-edge lineage, and ProtoSoda is that Soda core in Proton layout, so both are offered.

Usage

nix run .#ms365 -- install        # create prefix, winetricks, fetch ODT, download + install Office
nix run .#word                    # or: nix run .#ms365 -- run word ~/doc.docx
nix run .#ms365 -- status
nix run .#ms365 -- help

Or install it: nix profile install .#ms365 gives you ms365, ms365-word, ms365-excel, ... plus .desktop entries.

The install downloads several GB into ~/.local/share/ms365/odt/Office and then runs the click-to-run installer inside the prefix. Leave the installer window alone; it looks frozen for long stretches.

Optional: Office Home 2024 (retail key)

Microsoft 365 stays the default (nix run ., .#word, packages.default). The flake also packages the one-time-purchase Office Home 2024 as a separate, opt-in output, .#office2024: the same launcher with the Home2024Retail product (Current channel), its own commands and its own prefix in ~/.local/share/office2024, so the two can be installed side by side. Home 2024 is Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

nix run .#office2024 -- winetricks webview2   # the Microsoft sign-in page needs it
nix run .#office2024 -- install
nix run .#word2024                            # also .#excel2024 .#powerpoint2024 .#onenote2024

nix profile install .#office2024 gives office2024, office2024-word, ... and "Microsoft Word 2024 (Proton)" style desktop entries. Every MS365_* knob below applies too.

Activation: redeem the key at https://setup.office.com first, which attaches the licence to your Microsoft account. Do not type the key into Office ("I have a product key"): entering a key goes through the Windows Software Protection Platform, which Wine does not have (the sppc/ shim refuses key installs). The product runs in the same vNext mode as Microsoft 365; at the first start Word shows "Sign in to get started", and signing in with the account the key was redeemed to activates it. Verified with a retail Home 2024 key.

Office LTSC 2024 keys do not work. LTSC (ProPlus2024Volume, Standard2024Volume, and the cheap "LTSC" keys sold online) is volume licensed. It has no account-based activation: it only activates through the Windows Software Protection Platform, with a MAK key checked against Microsoft's activation servers or through a KMS host, and Wine does not implement that service (sppc/ is a minimal stand-in that stores licences and refuses key installs). Getting LTSC to activate would mean implementing enough of SPP (sppsvc and the SL* licensing APIs Office calls) for Office to install a key, activate it and then validate the licence. Pull requests for that are welcome and encouraged if you want to give it a try.

OneNote works as of 2026-09-23: it starts, signs in, shows the notebook and page lists and the page, and edits save. Getting there took four fixes (all in the table below): a start-up crash in Office's App-V layer, page text drawn as black boxes, the navigation panes hidden behind a black layer (a Wayland driver fix, wayland-fix/), and OneNote's own "How do you want to start OneNote?" prompt after every unclean exit. OneNote for the web (installable as a PWA) remains an alternative on the same OneDrive notebooks.

Pull requests are welcome, for anything in the known-problems list. Most fixes here follow the same loop: MS365_DEBUG=1 (plus MS365_WINEDEBUG channels), find the Wine stub or missing class Office trips on in ~/.local/share/<ms365|office2024>/logs/steam-0.log, and fill the gap in one of the shims.

Knobs

All optional, all environment variables:

Variable	Default	Meaning
MS365_RUNNER	ge	ge (nixpkgs proton-ge-bin), protosoda (Bottles Soda core), or an absolute Proton dir
MS365_PREFIX	~/.local/share/ms365/prefix	Proton compat-data dir (Wine prefix lives in pfx/)
MS365_PRODUCT	O365ProPlusRetail	ODT product id (O365BusinessRetail, O365HomePremRetail, ProPlus2024Retail, ...)
MS365_CHANNEL	Current	Update channel
MS365_VERSION	unset	Pin an Office build, e.g. 16.0.18129.20158. Older builds are less likely to trip Wine
MS365_EDITION	64	64 or 32
MS365_LANG	en-us	Language
MS365_EXCLUDE	Teams OneDrive Lync Bing Groove	ODT ExcludeApp ids. Add Outlook OneNote Access Publisher for a minimal install
MS365_WINETRICKS	corefonts msxml6 riched20 gdiplus	Verbs applied before install
MS365_ODT_SETUP	unset	Use a local ODT setup.exe instead of downloading the current one
MS365_SCA	0	1 switches to Shared Computer Activation (business subscriptions only) instead of vNext token licensing
MS365_RADV_DEBUG	unset	AMD driver flags to export as RADV_DEBUG (debugging aid, not needed)
MS365_TRACE_MODULE	unset	debugging: the shim logs every export lookup into this DLL and every failed lookup (MS365_DEBUG=1 to see them)
MS365_WAYLAND	1	Wine's Wayland driver in a Wayland session; 0 for X11/Xwayland (popup menus close instantly there under sway and other wlroots compositors)
MS365_NO_PIXEL_UNITS	unset	1 turns off the shim's Direct2D pixel-unit-mode fix (Excel's formula-bar icons, see the fixes table)
MS365_DPI	unset	Wine dpi. Unset: 96 × the focused sway output's scale (capped at 180, see "Known problems") on the Wayland driver, 96 on X11
UMU_LOG	unset	1 or debug for umu output

Example, try the Soda core with a minimal install:

MS365_RUNNER=protosoda MS365_EXCLUDE="Teams OneDrive Lync Bing Groove Outlook OneNote Access Publisher" \
  nix run .#ms365 -- install

Debugging

• Logs: ~/.local/share/ms365/logs/ (umu/wine stderr) and ~/.local/share/ms365/odt/logs/ (ODT).
• ms365 exec regedit, ms365 exec winecfg, ms365 exec cmd, ms365 winetricks <verbs>.
• ms365 install download / ms365 install configure rerun a single phase.
• ms365 reset --yes deletes the prefix but keeps the downloaded Office payload.
• If a run wedges, ms365 kill.

What it took (and where it stands)

Status as of 2026-09-16 with GE-Proton11-7 and Microsoft 365 Apps build 16.0.20326.20144:

• The Office Deployment Tool downloads and installs the full suite inside the prefix.
• Word starts (with /q, no splash screen), draws its start screen and ribbon, and shows the Sign in button. On first start it also raises a "Microsoft Office cannot verify the license" dialog because the licensing shim below reports no licences. Sign-in / activation has not been verified yet.
• Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and the rest are installed but untested.

Fixes the flake applies automatically, each one found by reading the Wine and Click-to-Run logs:

Problem	Fix
Installer error 0-2031 (17002): integrator aborts in sppc.dll.SLInstallLicense, a Wine stub	sppc/: replacement Software Protection Platform client DLL that accepts licence installs and reports nothing installed
Installer crash in the LastRun task: Wine's WinRT PackageManager returns E_NOINTERFACE for a newer interface and Office dereferences NULL	appxdeploymentclient DLL override disabled; Office logs the failure and continues
Excel never touches ole32, so the ole32 shim (all of the fixes below that live in it) never loaded there	the same DLL is also installed as ms365shim.dll and loaded into every process through AppInit_DLLs; whichever instance loads second stays passive
Word: CoRegisterActivationFilter missing from ole32 (mso30win32client dereferences NULL)	ole32-shim/: forwarder ole32.dll that re-exports the builtin (kept as ole32_wine.dll) and implements the function
Word: SetFileShortNameW, FindPackagesByPackageFamily, SetThreadpoolTimerEx not exported by Wine's kernel32; the loader binds them to aborting stubs	the ole32 shim registers a loader notification and rewrites those import slots in every module with benign replacements
Word: special user APCs (QueueUserAPC2) dispatched wrongly by this Wine, Office aborts	the shim hides QueueUserAPC2 from GetProcAddress; Office uses its pre-20H1 path
Word: splash-screen thread crashes in combase during COM apartment teardown, Office's crash handler kills the app	Word is launched with /q
mso.dll and friends live in Office's VFS tree; the App-V redirection layer is unreliable under Wine	the VFS tree is mirrored into Program Files with symlinks
Office offers safe mode after every crash via a modal prompt	the launcher clears the Resiliency key before starting an app
Sign-in dies with 53u4r / 12009 after the password (or on the email page)	Wine's winhttp/wininet reject unimplemented option codes with 12009; the shim accepts them (winhttp 77/140, wininet 11)
Licensing dialog fails with E_NOINTERFACE	shim serves ILanguageStatics and IJsonObjectStatics, which Wine's WinRT factories lack
Word exits at start on the legacy licensing path	product set to vNext licensing mode (LicensingNext = 2), SCA off by default
Ribbon font/size boxes, Comments/Editing/Share buttons and the title-bar search field are solid grey blocks; a control only shows its text while hovered, icons vanish under the hover highlight	GE-Proton 11's Wine (11.0 base) ships a d2d1 that ignores the fill mode of geometry groups. Office draws each control's border as two nested rounded rectangles with even-odd fill (a ring); Wine fills the union, and the compositor stretches that slab over the text. d2d1-fix/ ships d2d1.dll from nixpkgs' Wine 11.16 (fixed upstream in February 2026) with its builtin signature blanked so Proton loads it, registered as a native override.
Dialogs (e.g. "save changes?") make the whole window flicker and the document area draw at the wrong scale on the Wayland driver; Excel shows black crosshair lines across the window	Office draws dialog shadows with unowned layered MSO_BORDEREFFECT_WINDOW_CLASS popups; the Wayland driver makes each an independent toplevel, sway tiles them and the layout reshuffles until the dialog closes. The shim gives those windows an owner (the active window), so they become transient and float
Thin lines across the middle of the screen on the Wayland driver (a vertical and a horizontal one through a maximized Word)	those are the same shadow strips, floated: a Wayland client cannot position its toplevels, so sway centres each one. On the Wayland driver the shim also subclasses the strips and drops SWP_SHOWWINDOW in WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING, so they never show; Office just has no window shadows
Office Home 2024 install: setup.exe aborts half a second in, no log (exit 3)	for consumer SKUs the ODT bootstrapper asks the WinRT PackageManager whether Office is installed from the Store and aborts when the class cannot be activated. Wine's appxdeploymentclient answers that query, so it is enabled for setup.exe only (AppDefaults\setup.exe\DllOverrides); OfficeClickToRun.exe keeps it disabled (see the LastRun row above)
Word exits with code 64 a second after start, before the "Sign in to get started" dialog can open	the dialog (react-native-win32) draws its icons with ID2D1DeviceContext5::CreateSvgDocument, a stub returning E_NOTIMPL in Wine's d2d1; Office writes through the missing document. The shim wraps D2D1CreateFactory (Office links it as d2d1 #1) and on the first call patches the device-context vtable so CreateSvgDocument falls back to an empty document that accepts everything and draws nothing. The dialog works, its two icons are blank
OneNote refuses to start: "You'll need to install the Desktop Experience before you start OneNote"	OneNote checks that the Tablet PC ink object CLSID_InkDisp (InkObj.dll) is registered; Wine's inkobj is an empty stub, so OneNote concludes it is on Windows Server without the Desktop Experience feature. ms365uia.dll (uia-shim/) now also serves an empty InkDisp (every ink method E_NOTIMPL), registered by the launcher
OneNote runs SELECT Name FROM Win32_ServerFeature; Wine's WMI answers with an empty result where client Windows says "invalid class"	the shim wraps CoCreateInstance(Ex) for CLSID_WbemLocator only and makes that query fail with WBEM_E_INVALID_CLASS. OneNote delay-loads CoCreateInstanceEx through ntdll's resolver, which the GetProcAddress hook never sees, so the shim also fills those delay-load slots up front. Not needed once InkDisp is registered, kept as the client-Windows answer
OneNote's React Native JavaScript thread loops in Office's error reporting (hundreds of thousands of handled access violations a minute)	react-native-win32 builds a Windows.Web.Http HttpBaseProtocolFilter and HttpClient at start; Wine has no Windows.Web.Http. The shim serves stand-ins (filter, cache control, client, HttpMethod; requests fail with 0x80072EFD "cannot connect") and exports DllGetActivationFactory; the launcher registers them under WindowsRuntime\ActivatableClassId with ms365shim.dll as DllPath. Experimental. (The blank navigation pane once blamed on this was the Wayland stacking problem below)
OneNote crashes about every second start (page fault writing 0x8 in AppVIsvSubsystems64, under winhttp → crypt32 → CloseHandle)	Wine's crypt32 builds its default certificate chain engines on first use; when two threads verify a certificate at once, both build one and the loser frees its copy immediately. Closing that copy's registry store (the key, then its change-notification event) crashes in Office's App-V layer. The shim wraps CertGetCertificateChain and serialises the first chain on each default engine, so there is no loser
OneNote opens with "How do you want to start OneNote?" (start normally / delete the cache / delete settings) after a crash or a kill	OneNote keeps its own ConsecutiveBootCrashes / ConsecutiveEarlyCrashes counters under OneNote\General; the launcher resets them along with Office's safe-mode prompt (kept with MS365_KEEP_SAFEMODE_PROMPT=1)
OneNote draws every line of page text (date, time, body) as a black box; only the title shows	OneNote renders each text line into a cache cell: clip, clear, clip again, clear to white, draw the glyphs, at DPI 180 with a translated world transform. Wine's d2d1 (including 11.16) turns a PushAxisAlignedClip rectangle into pixels as (rect × dpi/96) × transform, so the translation is not scaled while everything drawn is; at any DPI other than 96 a translated clip lands elsewhere and the line is clipped away. The shim wraps PushAxisAlignedClip and hands Wine a transform whose translation is already scaled while it computes the clip
OneNote's notebook and page lists stay black and its page is black until the window is resized; Excel's cell grid is sometimes blank until a resize	GE's Wayland driver gives each child window with its own swapchain a subsurface below the window surface and stacks it there when it is created or moved, so the one configured last ends up on top whatever the Win32 z-order says: OneNote's full-size navigation background (the bottom sibling, created after the lists) covered them, Excel's XLDESK covered the grid. wayland-fix/client-surface-zorder.patch restacks all client subsurfaces of a window in Win32 order whenever one is stacked; wayland-fix/winewayland.so is GE-Proton11-7's driver built with it (Steam Runtime 4 SDK container, stripped), and the flake swaps it into the runner. Worth sending upstream to GE
Excel's formula-bar buttons (name-box ▾, ⋮ grip, cancel / enter / fx, the expand chevron) and the splitter next to the sheet tabs are black boxes, or icons shifted down and cut in half	Office draws those icons as glyphs from its own symbol fonts (OFFSYM*.TTF) with Direct2D in pixel unit mode (D2D1_UNIT_MODE_PIXELS) on contexts whose DPI it sets to the system DPI. Wine's d2d1 (including 11.16) stores the unit mode but still scales everything by dpi / 96, so at 180 dpi each icon is drawn 1.875 times too large and too far down, mostly outside its box; the empty rest is transparent and shows as black. The shim wraps the device-context vtable: while a context is in pixel mode Wine's DPI is held at 96 and GetDpi reports the DPI Office set. MS365_NO_PIXEL_UNITS=1 turns it off
Segoe UI text (OneNote's canvas and messages, some dialogs) renders in Times New Roman	GE-Proton's prefix template maps Segoe UI to Times New Roman. The flake fetches Selawik (Microsoft's MIT-licensed, metric-compatible stand-in for Segoe UI), the launcher installs it into windows\Fonts and maps the Segoe UI family (regular, Semibold, Semilight, Light) to it
"Missing proofing tools" banner and no spell checking although the dictionaries are installed	Office finds its proofing tools through the Windows Installer API (component paths, feature states, "qualified components" per category and language), registrations the Click-to-Run integrator never writes under Wine. msi-components.py rebuilds all of them from the package manifests, and the ole32 shim answers the MSI calls Office makes with an empty product code (its "whichever package owns it" convention, imported by ordinal) from the registered products

Debug aids: MS365_DEBUG=1 writes Proton's Wine log with +seh; MS365_DEBUG=1 PROTON_LOG="+module" lists every unresolved import ("No implementation for ..."), which is how the kernel32 gaps were found. Office's own logs land in drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Local/Temp (PUTER-*.log for Click-to-Run, Diagnostics/<APP>/ for the apps).

Licensing and sign-in (where it stands)

Office licenses itself through the Windows Software Protection Platform (SPP), which Wine does not have. The sppc/ shim is a minimal stand-in: it stores the licence files the installer hands it, serves the SKU policies from them, and lets the out-of-box 5-day Grace licence run with a persisted timer. Nothing is reported as activated and no product keys are installed. Office's full SPP validation still fails under Wine (0xC004E003), and on the legacy licensing path Word then refuses to run ("Word has run into an error ... repair now?").

The flake therefore puts the product into Microsoft's token-based licensing mode ("vNext", HKCU\...\Common\Licensing\LicensingNext\<product> = 2, what Microsoft 365 Apps use since version 1910). In that mode Office skips the SPP validation, starts as "Unlicensed Product", and licenses itself from the signed-in account through the Office Licensing Service. Shared Computer Activation (MS365_SCA=1) is the alternative token mode for business subscriptions; a personal subscription is refused there with "cannot be used to activate Office in shared computer scenarios" (0x80004005).

Sign-in works with a personal Microsoft account: OneAuth is kept, both Web Account Manager paths are switched off (Common\Identity and the Policies hives), the OneAuth broker is disabled and its login page is rendered by the Edge WebView2 runtime (feature gates under ExperimentConfigs\ExternalFeatureOverrides). The WebView2 runtime is not in the flake recipe yet: ms365 winetricks webview2 (680 MB) installs it into the prefix. Two request paths needed help from the ole32 shim: Wine's winhttp and wininet reject option codes they have not implemented with error 12009, which Office reports as sign-in error 53u4r / code 12009, so the shim accepts those tuning options.

What has been verified: sign-in completes, Word shows the account's OneDrive documents, and Office fetches the account's entitlements. What has not: an actual licence, because the test account had no Microsoft 365 subscription that includes the desktop apps. In that case Office tries to open its in-app purchase dialog, a WebView2 window in DirectComposition mode, and Wine's DirectComposition is a stub, so Word exits with code 64 instead. (Exit 64 is Office's crash handler; the licensing dialog's SVG icons were a confirmed cause of it for Office 2024, fixed in the shim, see the table above, so this may have been the same crash.) Buy or manage the subscription on the web, then sign in again in Word.

Other WinRT gaps the ole32 shim fills for the licensing code: Windows.Globalization.Language statics (ILanguageStatics) and Windows.Data.Json.JsonObject statics (Parse/TryParse, built on Wine's JsonValue).

Known problems

• Proofing categories are mapped by file role. The Click-to-Run manifests list which qualified component categories a language package publishes but not which file each one stands for; msi-components.py maps them by name (speller and "Normal" dictionary to MSSP*.LEX, grammar to MSGR*.LEX, hyphenation and thesaurus split between engine DLL and lexicon). Spelling works; if hyphenation or the thesaurus (Shift+F7) refuse a language, those two mappings are the suspects.
• Right-click and other popup menus close immediately under sway on the X11 driver (MS365_WAYLAND=0). Office activates its popup, hides and re-shows it while positioning it, and sway's Xwayland layer moves keyboard focus back to the main window in between; Wine then sends Office the message that cancels the menu. The Wayland driver, the default, keeps focus inside Wine.
• Wayland driver and HiDPI. The driver reports the monitor at 96 dpi, so the launcher sets Wine's dpi from the sway output scale. At exactly 192 dpi Word overflows its main thread's stack while building its first window (an Office recursion; same on GE-Proton 11-6 and 11-7), so the automatic value is capped at 180, which renders and takes input correctly on GE-Proton11-7. GE-Proton11-6's driver mixed pixel and logical coordinates in the window geometry (input offset, no input at all at 168/180 dpi) and could get disconnected for committing a surface before its configure; the flake pins 11-7 for its Wayland fixes.
• Direct2D comes from a different Wine (d2d1-fix/): nixpkgs' Wine 11.16 d2d1.dll runs on GE-Proton 11's Wine 11.0. It only depends on public DLL interfaces, but if a future Proton bumps its Wine past the fix the override becomes unnecessary; if a future nixpkgs Wine adds a dependency the Proton base lacks, the launcher's log will show d2d1 failing to load.

Expectations

This is the college try, not a guarantee. Things that historically break: Microsoft account sign-in (WebView2/Edge based), OneNote, Teams, and anything touching WinRT Windows.* APIs. If the installer dies early, pin an older build with MS365_VERSION, or switch runners.