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 lengthy docx converted by LibreOffice. Images, text boxes and arrows all came back to 1997 unscathed.

I've never thought to try this.

Now I have to try this.

You're welcome to join!

Installation requires the 32 bit Wine runtime, which will require pulling in your distro's 32 bit libs. After that set

   export WINEARCH="win32"

It is worth noting that Office 97 + all deps required for 32 bit Wine is still a smaller installation size than any recent Office.

Interestingly, this announcement makes it sound like you might not even need 32-bit libraries anymore:

- The 64-bit Windows-on-Windows (WoW64) architecture is implemented, and supports running a 32-bit Windows application inside a 64-bit Unix host process, using thunks to map 32-bit NT system calls to the 64-bit NTDLL.

- WoW64 thunks are implemented for most Unix libraries, enabling a 32-bit PE module to call a 64-bit Unix library. Once the remaining modules are converted to PE, this will make it possible to run 32-bit applications without installing 32-bit Unix libraries.

I wonder how that will work on M1 macs. Right now, trying to run any 32-bit executable with Wine 6 is being met with "bad CPU type in executable".

Available at https://github.com/Gcenx/homebrew-wine if you want to use a free build for example.