Wine 2.0 lands: It's not Soylent for booze but more Windows apps on Linux and Mac OS

If you really want to run MS Office 2013 on Linux, you can

Wine, the open source tool that translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls, and therefore lets Windows apps run on Linux, Mac OS and BSD, has reached version 2.0.

The tool's developers rate the ability to run Microsoft Office 2013 and 64-bit support on Mac OS as the most significant of the 6,000-plus changes.

Support for Office 2013 is possible thanks to the inclusion of a Web Services API that allows basic SOAP calls.

There's also many graphics improvements to support higher-resolution displays, plus support for more graphics cards. Direct3D 10 and 11 get a guernsey.

JSON is now supported and the "winebrowser" helper application now “supports multiple arguments to invoke the host browser or mailer.”

In the kernel, a new driver architecture means human interface devices get better support. In future releases, it's hoped that USB devices will be supported.

Such advances may come more quickly than they have in the past. Wine took 15 years to reach version 1.0 which emerged in 2008. The project's now adopted a new development process in expects will deliver significant annual releases.

Source code is yours for the taking here, as a tarball, or you can grab built packages here. ®