The port was so perfect! Not the Corel ones, but the one from SD Corp. I'd love to have that running again.

Can it be run on modern Linux?

I looked into it just now.

Somebody has WordPerfect 8 binaries around.

It requires libc5 - the c library that was common before glibc became common at the end of the 90s. And then needs X libraries that are compiled against libc5.

Probably you could find an old Red Hat 5 or something and pull out those libraries to run on a recent kernel.

I think WordPerfect 8 was where Corel rewrote it. It didn't work nearly as well. I vaguely recall they switched from native to some kind of compatibility layer (maybe Wine?) which just wasn't very good.

for everyone that bitches about docker and ubuntu snaps, this is a perfect application of them

I wonder if libc5 is so old that it has problems with docker. But I remember loki games being statically linked to avoid problems with dependencies. You only needed like linux syscalls and X11 for them to work.

i dont see why it would have an issue.

docker has no concept of the binaries that actually run, it just sets up namespaces, cgroups and a userspace. worse case scenario, you have to run the docker container as privileged, still no difference from running on host (at least with a properly constructed image, where the binaries wouldn't run as root)

libc5 was just a linux-specific fork of glibc. glibc2 == libc6