LinOffice enables you to run Microsoft Office applications in Linux. In the background, it runs a virtual machine with Windows and Office installed which is then accessed via FreeRDP. LinOffice's aim is to be a "1-click" setup for Microsoft Office in Linux.

By default, Microsoft Office 2024 (Home & Retail) is installed, containing Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Onenote and Outlook. If you have a Microsoft Office 365 subscription you can log in with your Microsoft account and it should upgrade from 2024 to 365.

The project utilises Winapps, Dockur/Windows, FreeRDP, Podman, and Qemu. You can run LinOffice alongside WinApps - all the names and RDP ports have been changed to avoid conflicts between the two.

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• Automatic non-interactive setup
• Run Microsoft Office apps as if they were native Linux apps
• Office apps have access to /home folder and Linux clipboard
• Run Publisher or Access, if manually installed by user
• Quickly access useful tools such as Powershell, Command Prompt, Windows Explorer, Registry Editor, Office Language Settings
• Run a full Windows session via RDP or VNC
• Automatic suspension of the Windows container when inactive, resume when starting an Office app
• Automatic deletion of Office lock files (like ~$file.docx)
• Force time sync in Windows after Linux host wakes up from sleep, to avoid time drift (time zone is always set to UTC for simplicity)
• Automatic detection of language, date format, thousand and decimal separator, currency symbol, keyboard layout etc
• Toggle settings such as display scaling, auto-suspend on/off, network on/off (to prevent Windows and Office from "phoning home")
• Circumvent geo-blocking for the Office installation
• Install updates for Windows and Office
• Tidy Quick Access pane in Windows File Explorer
• Automatically debloats Windows and disables telemetry and ads, using Win11Debloat
• Troubleshooting functions e.g. force cleanup of Office lock files, recreate .desktop files for the Office apps, reboot the Windows container, container health check

*requires manual setup, e.g. VirtIO-win and WinFSP or Samba when using Virt-Manager/Qemu, or Virtualbox Guest Additions for Virtualbox

**PlayOnLinux 4 has install scripts for Office 2016 and below that may or may not work

All Linux distributions are supported.

Hardware requirements:

• Sufficient resources (the Windows VM is allowed to take up to 4 GB RAM, 64 GB storage and 4 CPU cores if needed). The script will check that you have at least 8 GB RAM and 64 GB free storage before proceeding.
• Virtualization support (using kvm)
• x86_64 CPU (ARM is currently not supported, although it would be possible)
• Fast Internet connection as you will need to download several GB from Micrsoft

To download and install LinOffice and all the necessary dependencies, run this in a terminal:

curl -sSL https://github.com/eylenburg/linoffice/raw/refs/heads/main/quickstart.sh -o quickstart.sh && chmod +x quickstart.sh && ./quickstart.sh

This should automatically install all the required dependencies for most distros and should work with most distros.

Dependencies that need to be installed:

• Podman
• Podman-Compose
• FreeRDP (v3)
• Python3 (optional, for the GUI)
• PySide6 (optional, for the GUI)

First, install the dependencies (see above).

Then:

1. Download this repo (e.g. release version or latest git version)
2. Unzip and save in a convenient folder (e.g. ~/.local/bin/linoffice)
3. Either run the setup script (chmod +x setup.sh && ./setup.sh) or start the GUI which will automatically set things up (python3 gui/linoffice.py)

The installation should do everything automatically but will take quite a while. You need to download about 8 GB in total and wait until both Windows and Office are installed. In my experience, on a modern laptop (2023 mid-range AMD Ryzen CPU) and with fast Internet (250 Mbps download), it took about 15 minutes all in (breakdown: 3 minutes Windows download, 8 minutes Windows install, 4 minutes Office download and install).

If the setup succeeds without issues, please share your system setup which will be very helpful in order to know where LinOffice works out of the box.

• LinOffice: There's a built-in updater in the GUI. Otherwise, you can manually download the newest version and replace the old files with it. Don't delete all of your old files (as there are some files that will be created during the initial setup), just overwrite any existing ones.
  • If you already have a working Windows VM from LinOffice v1.0.7 and below, and you want to update, all the files in linoffice/config/oem will need to be manually copied again into C:\OEM in the Windows VM, overwriting any existing ones. In the RDP session (./linoffice.sh windows) you can access your Linux /home folder at \\tsclient\home.
• Windows & Office: Should auto-update but there's also an update script in the GUI (or you can run ./linoffice.sh update from the terminal.)

You can run the uninstall.sh to remove everything or click on the Uninstall button in the "Troubleshooting" menu.

After installation, you should find the launchers for the Office applications in your app menu.

You can open files from your file manager with Right-click -> Open with.

You will find a launcher for "LinOffice" in your app menu.

If you are using the terminal commands often, you might want to create an alias by running echo "alias linoffice='/home/user/.local/bin/linoffice/linoffice.sh'" >> ~/.bashrc && source ~/.bashrc - but make sure to adjust the username and path to where your linoffice.sh script is saved. This will enable you to run the LinOffice script from anywhere with the linoffice command.

• linoffice [excel|word|powerpoint|onenote|outlook]: runs one of the predefined Office applications
• linoffice manual [msaccess.exe|mspub.exe]: run Microsoft Access or Microsoft Publisher, if installed (they are not part of the default Office version installed by LinOffice)
• linoffice manual [explorer.exe|regedit.exe|powershell.exe|cmd.exe]: runs a specific Windows app in the Windows PATH
• linoffice manual "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\SETLANG.EXE": like above, but for any application (here: Microsoft Office Language Preferences tool)
• linoffice windows: shows the whole Windows desktop in an RDP session
• linoffice update: runs an update script for Windows in Powershell
• linoffice reset: kills all FreeRDP processes, cleans up Office lock files, and reboots the Windows VM
• linoffice stopcontainer: stops and then removes the podman container (but not its data) and cleans up all associated resources
• linoffice cleanup [--full|--reset]: cleans up Office lock files (such as ~$file.xlsx) in the home folder and removable media; --full cleans all files regardless of creation date, --reset resets the last cleanup timestamp

The setup script (setup.sh) has these CLI options:

• ./setup.sh --desktop: Only (re)create the .desktop files (app launchers)
• ./setup.sh --firstrun: Force RDP and Office installation checks (can be used after the Windows VM has finished installation)
• ./setup.sh --installoffice: Only run the Office installation script script (in case the Windows installation has finished but Office is not installed)
• ./setup.sh --healthcheck: Check that the system requirements are met and dependencies are installed and the container is healthy (there is also a button for this in the GUI)

You will need an Office 2024 license key or Office 365 subscription to use Office. During the first 5 days after installation, you can use Office without activation by clicking on "I have a product key" and then on the "X" of the window where you are supposed to enter your product key.

The Microsoft Activation Scripts (MAS) will also work if you have, let's say, trouble with activation - just run ./linoffice.sh manual powershell.exe from the script's directory to open a Powershell window where you can then paste the command to run MAS.

The Office application are running in a virtual machine with Windows, meaning that the printers you have set up in Linux are not available. There are two options if you need to print from Office:

1. Print to PDF / export to PDF and then print the PDF from Linux
2. If you have a network printer you can easily install it in Windows. Find out its local IP address (e.g. with lpstat -v), then open the Windows VM (e.g. via the Tools menu in LinOffice), then Settings -> Printers and Scanners -> Add Device -> Add a new device manually -> Add printer using IP Address

If you have problems with the setup script, such as Office not being found or FreeRDP not connecting, do the following:

1. Access the VM through 127.0.0.1:8006 in the browser (password to log in is MyWindowsPassword) and check:

• Does the VM run and let you log in? If not, check windows_install.log (in ~/.local/share/linoffice) to see what could have gone wrong.
• Is Microsoft Office installed? If not, try to download and install Office manually, then create an empty file (not folder) called success in C:\OEM\, then sign out (!) of the Windows account using the Start Menu but don't shut down Windows

2. After this, run ./setup.sh --firstrun from Linux

If it works now, congratulations.

If you still get an error, test if you can connect to the VM using RDP.

1. Make sure you are not still logged in via VNC (i.e. in the browser); if you are, sign out the Windows user account
2. Check what the correct command for FreeRDP is on your system. This can be xfreerdp3 or (less likely) xfreerdp, or if you have installed it through Flatpak, it would be flatpak run --command=xfreerdp com.freerdp.FreeRDP.
3. Run this command, but make sure to use the correct FreeRDP command at the beginning: xfreerdp3 /cert:ignore /u:MyWindowsUser /p:MyWindowsPassword /v:127.0.0.1 /port:3388 --- It should open a window showing the Windows VM. If yes, close the window.
4. Run this command, but make sure to use the correct FreeRDP command at the beginning: xfreerdp3 /cert:ignore /u:MyWindowsUser /p:MyWindowsPassword /v:127.0.0.1 /port:3388 /app:program:explorer.exe --- It should open a window with the Windows File Explorer. If yes, close the window.
5. Run this command, but make sure to use the correct FreeRDP command at the beginning: xfreerdp3 /cert:ignore /u:MyWindowsUser /p:MyWindowsPassword /v:127.0.0.1 /port:3388 /app:program:excel.exe --- It should open a window with Excel. If yes, close the window.
6. After this, run ./setup.sh --firstrun from Linux again and hopefully it succeeds now.

If there is still a problem in the setup, even though you have just confirmed that Office is installed and you can launch Office applications from Linux using FreeRDP, do this:

1. In ~/.local/share/linoffice/ edit the file called setup_progress.log and add the line office_installed at the end if it doesn't yet exist
2. Run ./setup.sh --desktop to create .desktop files (app launchers in Linux)

Now you should be able to find the "Linoffice" GUI as well as the starters for Word, Excel etc. in your Linux menu.

If you still can't get the setup to work, please create a bug report ("setup didn't work") with these information:

• The windows_install.log and setup_output.log (in ~/.local/share/linoffice)
• The setup.log, setup_office.log, and setup_rdp.log (if they exist) in C:\OEM in the Windows VM (if you can only access the VM through the browser/VNC, there is no clipboard sharing with Linux, so a screenshot is fine)
• Your system information (LinOffice version, Linux distribution, desktop environment, Wayland or X11, how did you install podman, podman-compose and freerdp?)

Some users have reported the issue that when they try to log in to Microsoft (e.g. in order to activate Microsoft 365) they login window would hang and not progress. The workaround for this access a "full" RDP session (in GUI: Tools -> Access Windows desktop via RDP; in CLI: ./linoffice.sh windows). You should be able to log in in this session. Afterwards, you can close the window and use LinOffice as usual.

In my experience, window management can be wonky, particularly if you're using Wayland instead of X11 or if you're using multiple monitors.

A potential solution for multimonitor issues could be to open the file config/linoffice.conf and in the last line (RDP_FLAGS) adding /multimon. This is supposed to add multimonitor support to FreeRDP, but a FreeRDP bug may result in a black screen, in which case you should revert this change.

I believe that these are FreeRDP issues. If it becomes too bad, you can try ./linoffice.sh reset to kill all FreeRDP processes and reboot the Windows VM - but be aware that you will lose any unsaved Office documents this way.

Theoretically, this should be done automatically by the setup script but it might fall back to the US layout if it doesn't detect your Linux keyboard layout or can't match it to a Microsoft keyboard layout. There are two ways to manually set the keyboard layout:

Option 1:

• In the GUI, you can choose the keyboard layout in Settings. If you're not using the GUI you can achieve the same thing manually:
  • In the LinOffice folder, open the config/linoffice.conf and find the row saying RDP_KBD="".
  • Check this list of keyboard layouts to find the numeric code for your keyboard layout in the first code.
  • Edit the line in the config file like these examples: RDP_KBD="/kbd:layout:0x0809" for the UK keyboard or RDP_KBD="/kbd:layout:0x0407" for the German keyboard

Option 2 (if the above doesn't work):

• Access the Windows VM, either via RDP (./linoffice.sh windows) or VNC (127.0.0.1:8006 in the browser, password is MyWindowsPassword)
• Open the Windows Settings app and set your keyboard layout in there.
• Open the Command Prompt (cmd.exe) and enter: REG ADD "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout" /v IgnoreRemoteKeyboardLayout /t REG_DWORD /d 1 (this tells Windows to use its own keyboard layout and not whatever the RDP client uses)

If you are using multiple keyboard layouts in Linux (e.g. a Latin and non-Latin script, changing the keyboard automatically is not supported yet (i.e. syncing the Windows keyboard layout with the Linux one whenever it is switched), but there is a workaround: winapps-org/winapps#43 (comment)

There is a strange issue that Microsoft Office will not clean up the lock files in the Linux /home folder. If you open, say, "Book1.xlsx" then Excel will create a file called "~$Book1.xlsx" which is just a few bytes in size and serves the purpose of "locking" this file so other users can't edit it at the same time. Normally these files should be deleted when you close the file, but this doesn't happen for whatever reason. The /home folder is mounted by FreeRDP and appears in Windows as a network drive accessed via RDP Drive Redirection (RDPDR).

LinOffice searches and deletes these lock files when the last Office process is closed. If this fails for any reason you can manually delete all lock files by running ./linoffice.sh cleanup --full or by using the button in the "Troubleshooting" window.

These are the files that are part of LinOffice and their functions:

This project is licensed under the GNU AGPL 3.

The main script (linoffice.sh) is forked from Winapps, AGPL license.

The Windows VM is set up using the Dockur/Windows OCI container, MIT license.

Windows and Office are directly downloaded from Microsoft. This project contains only open-source code and does not distribute any copyrighted material. Any product keys found in the code are just generic placeholders provided by Microsoft for trial purposes. You will need to provide your own product keys to activate Windows and Office.