An office suite for Wayland, without X11
Linux desktops have moved to Wayland, and some setups no longer carry an X server at all: kiosks, hardened workstations, minimal compositors, Xwayland switched off. Microsoft does not ship desktop Word, Excel or PowerPoint for Linux. SumDoc (.docx), SumSheet (.xlsx and .xlsm with VBA) and SumSlide (.pptx) are desktop editors for those files, and they run as native Wayland clients. We checked it on a session with no X server at all, and this page says exactly what was checked and how to run them on yours.
What we measured on 9 October 2026
The question was not "does a window appear". It was the full circle a person needs: open a real file, change it, save it, open it again and see the change.
| The session | An ARM64 (aarch64) machine, RPM-based enterprise Linux, kernel 6.12, the Weston compositor (13.0.95). In every run: DISPLAY not set, WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-0, and no Xwayland process running. The files were checked on the machine itself. |
|---|---|
| SumDoc · .docx | Opened a document, typed a marker word into the text through the normal keyboard input path, saved. The marker is in word/document.xml of the saved file; reopened, the text is there and the document reports no unsaved changes. |
| SumSheet · .xlsx | Opened a workbook, wrote a marker into cell A8, saved. The marker is in the saved package and in the cell after reopening. |
| SumSlide · .pptx | Opened a presentation, replaced the slide title, saved. The new title is in the slide XML and on the slide after reopening. |
| Without the flag | The same builds, started without --ozone-platform=wayland, looked for an X server and exited: Missing X server or $DISPLAY. Current builds choose Wayland on their own in this situation. |
What this does not cover: GNOME and KDE Plasma sessions, Fedora and Ubuntu, and x86-64 machines were not part of this run. The instructions for them below are how to start the apps there, not a measurement. The Linux downloads on this site are x86-64 today.
Run it on Wayland
SumDoc, SumSheet and SumSlide start on Wayland by themselves when there is no X server: if WAYLAND_DISPLAY is set and DISPLAY is not, they choose Wayland, and a platform you pass yourself is respected. In GNOME and Plasma sessions, where Xwayland is present, they still start through it; add --ozone-platform=wayland to run them natively there.
From a terminal
sumsheet --ozone-platform=wayland
sumslide --ozone-platform=waylandAppImage
chmod +x SumSheet-*.AppImage
./SumSheet-*.AppImage --ozone-platform=waylandThe same works for the SumDoc and SumSlide AppImages.
From the applications menu
Copy the launchers of the installed .deb or .rpm into your home folder with the flag added; your copy takes priority over the system one and survives updates:
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/applications
for f in $(grep -lE '^Exec="?/opt/Sum(Doc|Sheet|Slide)/' /usr/share/applications/*.desktop); do
sed -E '/^Exec=/ s/( %[UuFf])?$/ --ozone-platform=wayland\1/' "$f" \
> ~/.local/share/applications/"$(basename "$f")"
doneTo go back, delete those copies from ~/.local/share/applications.
Check that it really is Wayland
env -u DISPLAY sumsheet --ozone-platform=waylandWith DISPLAY removed the app has no way to reach an X server, so if the window opens, it is a native Wayland client. That is the same condition our measurement ran under.
Get the apps
.deb for Debian and Ubuntu, .rpm for Fedora and other RPM distributions, AppImage for anything else, all x86-64, with SHA-256 checksums next to every version: download SumDoc and SumSheet, download SumSlide. No account, no key, no sign-up needed to work.
What survives a round-trip through SumSheet in a macro workbook, measured on a real file, is on Open an .xlsm without Excel. If you would rather not install anything, the same editors run in the browser: open a spreadsheet, open a document.
Questions people ask
Does it run without Xwayland?
Yes. On 9 October 2026 SumDoc, SumSheet and SumSlide each opened a file, took an edit, saved it and reopened it on a Wayland session with DISPLAY unset and no Xwayland process running. They choose Wayland by themselves when there is no X server; no flag is needed.
How do I run it in a GNOME or KDE Plasma Wayland session?
Install and start it as usual: GNOME and Plasma provide Xwayland, so the apps start through it. To run them as native Wayland clients, add --ozone-platform=wayland to the command or to the menu launcher, as above. Our measured run was on the Weston compositor; GNOME and Plasma were not part of it.
Does it work on Fedora and on Ubuntu 24.04 or newer?
Use the .rpm on Fedora, the .deb on Ubuntu, or the AppImage on either; the Linux downloads are x86-64. Both distributions start GNOME on Wayland by default, so the GNOME answer applies. We have not yet run the measured open–edit–save–reopen test on Fedora or Ubuntu themselves; when we do, the result goes on this page.
Is there a Linux version of Microsoft Word or Excel?
Microsoft does not publish desktop Word, Excel or PowerPoint for Linux. SumDoc, SumSheet and SumSlide are independent desktop editors for .docx, .xlsx/.xlsm and .pptx files that run on Linux, on X11 and on Wayland. They are not made by or affiliated with Microsoft.
What about LibreOffice on Wayland?
LibreOffice has its own Wayland support through its GTK and Qt backends. We do not test LibreOffice and do not describe its problems here. SumOffice installs side by side with it, so you can keep both and use SumOffice for the Office files.
Is it free?
The desktop apps are free to download, with no account, no key and no sign-up needed to work. Running the editors as a server inside your own product is licensed separately: licensing.
If something does not start on your compositor, tell us which one and what the terminal printed; that is how the next check gets added to this page.
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