// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Bottles Creator Mirko Brombin Wants Microsoft Office on Linux, Not Its Clones
If you have used Linux for a while, chances are you have used something Mirko Brombin built. He created Bottles, the app that takes a lot of the pain out of running Windows software with Wine. He founded Vanilla OS. And these days, he is building Singularity OS, an operating system with its own desktop and its own approach to immutability.
We last spoke with Mirko back in 2022. A lot has happened since then. He now works full time at fabricators, he is working on getting Microsoft Office running through Bottles, and he has some strong views on AI and on the recent wave of apps cloning Adobe and Microsoft interfaces.
I sent him my questions over email. Here are his answers, exactly as he sent them.
I think anyone who's known me for a while knows that I'm not particularly good at sitting still, haha.
I've never really had a proper strategy for deciding what to dedicate my time to. Most of my projects are born from a problem I want to solve, an idea I want to experiment with, or simply the curiosity to find out whether something is possible.
Naturally, working full-time at fabricators and maintaining several open source projects, I've had to learn to set priorities. Not everything can receive the same attention, and not everything necessarily has to become a complete product.
Artificial intelligence has certainly changed a lot about the way I work, but I think it's important to explain how, because it's a topic I've really spent a lot of time thinking about.
When I wrote my articles about using AI agents in software development, I spent quite a lot of time just trying to find the right words. In open source, it's a particularly delicate subject, especially when you're someone with a fairly public presence and free software isn't just a passion, but also part of your work and your life.
It's very easy to be misunderstood, both by those who consider artificial intelligence the solution to every problem and by those who reject it completely, and honestly... I don't see myself in either position, because I've always had a rather complicated relationship with LLMs. At first I was very skeptical and, frankly, the more I tried to understand how they worked, the harder I found it to fully trust them.
The problem isn't the quality of the code they can produce, but understanding why they produced that particular code, because when I design software, I start from the architecture, I decide how the components should interact, what responsibilities they should have, how to handle errors, which compromises to accept and, logically, which ones to avoid. I document all of this very carefully, because I want to be able to understand every decision even years later, and it's a process I particularly care about and have absolutely no intention of delegating.