A half-broken Wine Office leaves menus, files and settings scattered across Ubuntu, and those leftovers sabotage the next install. This removal is complete — the apps, the prefix, the menu entries and the residue — so a fresh attempt, or a clean switch to another route, starts from zero.
There are two levels of removal. The polite one uses Wine's own uninstaller and keeps the prefix for other apps. The complete one — this guide — removes the whole Office prefix, which is what you want when an install is corrupt beyond repair, or when you are done with Wine Office and moving to the web apps, a local suite, or a virtual machine.
Your documents normally live in your ordinary Linux folders, completely outside Wine — deleting the prefix cannot touch them. But anything you saved from inside Office into its own fake C drive is in the prefix, so take one look before deleting.
ls $HOME/.wine-office/drive_c/users/$USER/If Office is merely unwanted rather than broken, Wine's own Add and Remove Programs equivalent is the tidy first attempt.
WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine-office wine uninstallerUnder Wine this uninstaller sometimes reports success while leaving most of the suite behind. If Office still appears afterwards, do not wrestle with it — go straight to the full removal below.
This is the step that makes the removal complete. One folder holds the fake Windows, the registry, every DLL and Office itself — removing it removes all of it at once.
WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine-office wineserver -krm -rf $HOME/.wine-officeThat single command is also the strongest argument for the main guide's habit of a dedicated Office prefix — because the prefix holds only Office, deleting it can never harm another Wine app.
Wine wrote launcher files for the app grid, and they survive the prefix itself. Stale Word and Excel icons after a removal come from here, not from a failed delete.
rm -rf $HOME/.local/share/applications/wine — safe when Office was the only Wine softwareProve the removal instead of assuming it. A full Office prefix commonly holds between 1.5 and 3 GB, and seeing that space return is your confirmation.
du -sh $HOME/.wine* — an Office prefix should no longer appearsudo apt remove wine64 wine32 winetricksMost people keep Wine installed — it is small, and a future experiment may want it. Removing Office was the goal; removing Wine is a separate decision.
If this cleanup was preparation for a fresh attempt, the video shows the correct install order to follow next.
▶️ Watch Full VideoThose are launcher files under ~/.local/share/applications/wine, which outlive the prefix. Delete that folder and log out and back in — the icons will be gone.
Not cleanly. Under Wine, Office installs and removes as one suite. Remove all of it, then reinstall and use the installer's custom option to choose only the components you want.
Often, yes. Most repeat install failures come from leftovers of the failed attempt — damaged registry entries and half-copied files — and this removal eliminates exactly those.