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Someone sent you a .pages file and you're not on a Mac. This is Apple Pages' native format, and it is spectacularly unhelpful outside Apple's ecosystem. Pages is a perfectly good word processor — clean, elegant, and free on every Mac and iPad. Its file format, however, is the opposite of interoperable.
A .pages file is actually a ZIP archive containing an IWA (iWork Archive) binary format, preview images, and metadata. You can rename it to .zip and extract a preview image, but you can't meaningfully edit the content outside of Pages. Apple chose a proprietary binary format rather than the XML approach used by DOCX and ODT, which makes third-party support effectively impossible.
iCloud.com opens Pages files in a browser — this is the best option if you're on Windows or Linux. You can also ask the sender to export as PDF or DOCX from Pages (File → Export To). If you receive .pages files regularly, iCloud.com is free and handles viewing and basic editing. For the sender: when sharing with non-Apple users, always export to DOCX or PDF first.