Understanding COM Technology Limitations
COM (Component Object Model) is a Microsoft technology that allows software components to communicate with one another. It’s a system-level technology that’s deeply tied to the Windows operating system and is used extensively in automation tasks involving Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, and other Windows-native applications.
COM is a proprietary Windows-only framework. It relies heavily on Windows-specific system calls, registry entries, and internal object handling mechanisms that simply don’t exist on Unix-based systems like macOS or Linux. This means that any software that uses COM — like the FilesMagic desktop app — cannot run natively on these platforms.
While tools like Wine attempt to emulate some Windows APIs on Linux, they do not fully or reliably support COM-based automation. Similarly, there is no native COM support in macOS, and using virtual machines to run the Windows version of FilesMagic introduces performance issues and complexity.
✅ Recommended: Use the web-based version of FilesMagic directly at FilesMagic.com. It works cross-platform on all major browsers and doesn’t require installation.
Other alternatives include using open-source tools like LibreOffice or Python libraries such as python-docx, pypdf, and unoconv — but they typically require programming knowledge and don't match the ease-of-use of FilesMagic.
Due to the technical limitations of COM on non-Windows platforms, FilesMagic’s desktop version cannot run on macOS or Linux. However, we’ve made sure to support those users through the fully functional online version — no download required, just visit FilesMagic.com.