DRM used to work; I installed Chrome in Lutris and managed to get Amazon Prime working, though Chrome was very buggy. Netflix sort of works in Firefox (needs an addon to play 1080p video, no idea about 4k).

Microsoft Office (at least, a version that's kept up to date) doesn't work in Wine. I find ONLYOFFICE to be a very competent replacement, though.

I've also used Cassowary to configure a Windows 10 VM + Remote Desktop Apps, which allow for Windows programs to appear native in the Linux launcher while secretly launching the VM and starting an RDP session for that application alone. It's a bit fiddly to set up, but it works if you rarely ever use Office.

As a last resort, you could do what Microsoft did with Windows 11 when Wordpad got removed: install Microsoft Office Online as a web application (requires Chromium/WebKit browser to be installed since Mozilla decided PWAs aren't important to desktop users).

If you don't care much about privacy risks, you could also skip the Linux crap and install ChromeOS Flex. It's probably the most user-friendly Linux desktop out there, and DRM should work out of the box.

Or just use reactos' Wordpad. Get their ISO, use 7zip to uncompress it, and search inside for a bigass CAB file which is hundred of MB's in size. Extract that with 7zip again under a "ros" folder and you'll have WordPad.exe, Calc and lots of goodies for free (as in freedom) in your Windows machine.

Why do you want to use wine to play Netflix videos on Linux. It works fine in the browser

Chrome on Windows supports different Widevine levels than Chrome on Linux does.

The higher levels all require keys baked into the GPU/other hardware support.

Doubt an emulator will help.

Yeah at that point just pirate things. Much easier and I don't think even the most moral person could argue against pirating something you can legally access anyway.

The money flows differently if you pirate it...

If you have a prime account and watch the show, then the shows actors/creators will get paid some cents from your prime membership fee.

Whereas if you have a prime subscription and pirate it, they won't.

Thats a content creator issue if they lose income due to DRM. Not our problem.

That's a you issue if a show you like gets canceled from lack of profitability due to pirating. It is your problem.

Open discussions like this should give them a hint what to do. Supporting DRM is just less ethical than pirating.

I honestly don’t care enough about TV.

Sounds like a job for a bot that follows your Plex / Jellyfin history and clicks play on the original streaming service. You get to avoid whatever terrible UI the media conglomerate shackled their content to, get a persistent copy that works offline, and the creators still get paid. Everybody wins :)

> I don't think even the most moral person could argue against pirating something you can legally access anyway.

you'll be surprised

Yeah I'd say use the browser version.

Id recommend just dual booting Linux for a while. I have windows installed on my pc basically for when I need to sign a PDF, but it's handy every once in a while.

I'm one very happy Linux Mint user. It's the best distro by far imo.

> Yeah I'd say use the browser version.

That's what I was hopeful of but I think online office doesn't support features like comparing documents and other "heavier"/pro tasks.

I am working on Linux and using web versions of office 365 apps. Outlook, teams, onenote, word, excel...

No issue with streaming on the browser either.

Recently I've been using more and more the web versions of Microsoft apps. This made me think that I'll be able to switch back to Linux soon, as now almost everything can be done in the browser.

As someone who loves the dev experience of WSL2 on Win11, try out https://github.com/LeDragoX/Win-Debloat-Tools to strip down your Win install and get some resources back.

Feels like swimming against the current tho. Said dev experience poorly emulates actual linux at best. Also, I’d think twice before running custom windows isos or unvetted scripts.

I wonder how well audited these random GitHub projects are that claim to make Windows suck less.

Running random shit from GitHub with my root password gives me the creeps, even though most of them are probably innocuous.

I've been thinking along similar lines for a while now, among a lot of users there isn't a sense of security 'hygiene' and a lot of trust granted that doesn't have a foundation beyond looking legit (i.e. has a github). The main thing that seems to be stop it happening is a lack of returns compared to going after a corporation or social engineering/phishing to find someone who will give you money. What I do wonder about is supply chain attacks on something used by a lot of smaller projects, which would end up hitting more targets compared to compromising individual small projects.

Be wary, unknown actors are targeting devs. My email that is only exposed in github recieves targeted mails on the regular, maybe randomly or maybe because I released and contributed to several popular code bases.

Dev credentials tend to unlock more doors than hacking a soccer mom.

Older versions of Office can work quite well under Wine. 2007 is quite easy to get going using PlayOnLinux or Crossover for example. Newer versions are more trouble.

Fair warning though, your battery life will be like 1/4 of what it is on Windows, and Linux's memory handling on OOM is much worse than Windows. So saving resources probably isn't the best motivation.

This depends on your hardware. Choose a laptop designed to run Linux, not Windows.

Netflix and Prime work fine on Linux, directly in the browser. I simply use Firefox, it just works.

Office has some pretty decent web apps (all of their apps switch to electron sooner or later anyway)