I understand why games are a big part of their focus, but I wish regular boring windows software was a bigger focus. I've tried so many times over the years to get WordPerfect and a few other niche business apps going in Wine/CrossOver to migrate my parents away from Windows with little success.
my kingdom for a solution that makes fusion 360 work on linux without quirks.
everything out there either drops the render speed to nothing, breaks integrations, breaks anything to do with the browser (which includes login), or creates strange mouse/keyboard behaviors that have to be fixed with more layers of patchwork.
The only halfway decent way to get it done is with qemu/gpu-passthrough , but that's a whole different pain in the ass.
I feel like it used to be, but perhaps I'm wrong. Regardless, with Proton around, it seems like focusing on games is not the best path forward for distinguishing their product, but competition isn't the worst thing.
Biggest problem with that strategy is that I just don't associate their brand with it. For whatever reason, perhaps their historical focus if I'm right about that, I always think of getting office and productivity apps working when I think Crossover.
Oh interesting, that hadn't occured to me, but they do mention macOS a lot in their materials, so that makes sense.
From what I've read, here and elsewhere, Apple doesn't really reciprocate contributions to WINE, so embedding improvements aimed at smoothing out the experience on that platform inside the commercial wing on WINE development makes some sense in general.
Thanks, their whole model makes a bit more sense to me now.
As I understand it, but to be clear I’m not involved in the wine community, codeweavers does a lot of the Mac contributions.
I know apple has game porting toolkit or whatever they call it, which is essentially proton for Mac (built in wine etc) but I don’t know to what extent that is upstreamed.
As a disclosure, I do currently work for the fruit company but not on this or anything adjacent and I’m not speaking for it in anyway.
Now a bunch of these are old ratings, but it should give you some sense of the history (current state?) of things. I think maybe Word works well enough (?) just because there are a lot of eyes on it. Everything else? Less so.
Crossover predates Proton by about 10-12 years, and currently CodeWeavers are one of the main companies contributing code to it.
The company did start their efforts as a way to make MS Office work on Macs, but I think that bringing games to linux/Mac is what made them known in the nerd circles.
And using Wine for games predates using Wine for MS Office by several years. MS Office has always been the primary target, but it's such a large surface area that some games were functional before MS Office was.
> The company did start their efforts as a way to make MS Office work on Macs
Wine and the Crossover company were Linux only for many years.
I'm really glad they exist! These days I mostly use wine via Proton/steam, but used cxoffice back before LibreOffice / google docs.
Today I just use crossover to run Quicken, which it does as well as Quicken runs anywhere. They have some magic to make it work when plain wine didn't.
So... WINE for Mac can run x86-32 apps again now? Awesome to hear, at least for my Intel stuff... but what I couldn't find, also not in the FAQ: can WINE/Crossover for Mac run x86/32/64 stuff on Apple Silicon machines?
(Alternatively: is there any at least somehow performant VM allowing me to run Windows 7 as a VM on Apple Silicon? I tried UTM but the guest tool drivers they ship are more or less all broken.)
Apple has forked (or something) crossover a while ago and has released their own tooling for playing games on macs. You can use this pretty easily without a lot of config using Whiskey or Heroic Games Launcher.
I've been playing Jagged Alliance 3 the past few days which I bought on GOG.
Kind of. It’s Wine with a bunch of Crossover patches plus Apple’s own changes. Codeweavers employees are the primary maintainers of the Wine project, and they open-source any Crossover-specific changes they make to Wine code (since Wine is LGPL).
(Source: GPTK logs a lot of messages containing the word “Crossover” while running games.)
They released a giant ruby blob of their patches. Usable, but certainly not cooperative. I wish Apple would get over themselves and just contribute to WINE. Make it seamless and easy for developers, and help fix the bugs as they find them. They are stuck in the middle of the chicken and egg problem while refusing to hatch some eggs.
For companies, contributing to open source projects is generally around 10x slower than just forking and doing it all internally. So it may be primarily just because it's easier for them.
The main reason I've been pushing really hard to get the code I work on upstreamed is to reduce merge conflicts when I pull from upstream! But it's a real slog.
True, and I've run into similar issues as well, especially with legal. At the very least they could release a cleanly mergable set of diffs, commented for the benefit of whatever poor soul had to merge that 20k patch.
It's Wine, but with additions made by full-time developers who are paid to work on it, backed by a support team that you can go to and say "Hey, help me get this Win32 app running".
What you get here is Wine and some level of guarantee that what you want to run will run. The focus is on applications rather than games.
Codeweavers contributes back to Wine upstream. Most changes that go into the Crossover fork of Wine end up in the main source tree, so this is a very good way of supporting Wine development and getting something out of it, but if all you're doing is playing games then you're mostly covered by Proton.
When Win10 EOLs I think CrossOver will be very important for allowing organisations to keep MS Office.
> It's Wine, but with additions made by full-time developers who are paid to work on it, backed by a support team that you can go to and say "Hey, help me get this Win32 app running".
That's the idea in theory, although I recall the one time I actually reached out with a Windows app that was unresponsive in Linux, the support guy just kinda shrugged on the ticket and nothing came of it.
I get that they have finite resources, but that wasn't exactly the level of support I was hoping for from a product I'm paying for. I still do pay for it (usually whenever I can get a promo discount on renewal), but I'm resigned to the idea that it will really only help on popular Windows applications.
I think something which could be really big thing is to run WINE in Windows, exactly to keep legacy applications running. That could be via WSL, but it would be even more useful if WINE ran on Windows itself. Some corporate computers can't enable WSL because of policies.
>When Win10 EOLs I think CrossOver will be very important for allowing organisations to keep MS Office.
Huh? If they're running windows 10 and Office don't you think they'll just upgrade to windows 11 instead of using emulation?
Organisations are on a ~3-4 year upgrade cycle and any computer made in the last 4 years from 2025 when windows 10 goes Eol will be able to run windows 11.
It's unfortunate something like ReactOS never took off. I guess if one wanted to do something similar from scratch would be to take something like NetBSD, strip it down and start Wine as the only thing running on it.
That could probably replace some embedded uses of Windows.
I'm still not completely sure who or what ReactOS is supposed to be for. If you want to run Windows applications, Wine on Linux works better. In fact, Wine and ReactOS exchange a lot of code in the user layer anyway, IIRC. Meanwhile, Linux is probably the best optimized, most ported and most customizable kernel we have.
The only thing you get by running ReactOS instead of Linux is... worse performance, worse hardware support and possibly a kernel based on leaked copyrighted code. What's the point?
For me, I still look forward to ReactOS one day becoming stable for the reason that I like the Windows programming model from the era ReactOS is targetting.
It's a fairly coherent system that is willing to not be *nix and really offers some serious power just under the hood.
Having something like that open-source would be a step closer to my dream machine.
Nowadays, not much except for legacy embedded use. (Though in practice, the stability of ReactOS isn't great and also there's the untested licensing situation of ReactOS. Allegedly some of the code might have been lifted from Microsoft code. This issue alone may have made companies stay clear of it.)
But way back when, before everything computing metastased into a fluffy Javascript cloud world, and when Linux wasn't as mature, an "Open Source Windows NT 4" would have been a great off-ramp off Microsoft. You know, "Year of Linux on the Desktop" which was such a coveted thing, could have been "Year of Open Source Win32" instead.
Instead, the Desktop waned in importance, we got cloud services and smart phones instead, and Linux grew up to be a force in its own right.
Drivers. The promise is that ReactOS will work with the Windows XP drivers for your ultra niche custom hardware for an industrial control system from an out of business supplier ( or point-of-sale system or whatever ).
ReactOS is still targeting 32 bit Windows at a time when even Linux is dropping support for 32 bit hardware.
CrossOver is a WINE implementation for people that want a really nice and simple interface. I used to beta test apps for them ages ago, which was nice, as that got me a free copy of the pro product. They recently just cleaned house on that program, and I lost my access, which, you know, fair, but also it happened right as I was wanting to check them out again after having managed WINE with other tools on my workstation.
By default, it makes brand new prefixes, has profiles for well known apps to configure the prefixes accordingly, including managing downloading the installers.
Their fixes and changes to their version of WINE are almost always upstreamed, so eventually you do get those features in OSS WINE, but that's honestly never been the reason to get it. It's the much more friendly UX, and for those using WINE in business environments, a channel to get support for the framework.
For those that want better prefix management for their home projects, there are plenty of OSS projects doing that now. Whisky for macOS, and Bottles for Linux are two fine alternatives to help keep WINE prefix hygiene without it, but neither come with the "we can install this business app for you with no hassle" concierge features.
These folks do know WINE well though. There's a reason they're working with Valve on Proton, and why so many of the commits to WINE come from them.
I have not used Codeweavers for many years, because I have switched to LibreOffice after it became able to convert well enough most of the MS Office documents.
Nevertheless, before that I have used Codeweavers CrossOver for some years, mainly to run MS Office on Linux.
During that time I have been very satisfied with Codeweavers CrossOver, because the latest MS Office Professional versions available in those years were running under Linux at least as stable as under Windows and for some operations they were even faster than under Windows (presumably due to the faster file system).
Earlier, during the Windows XP days, running MS Office Professional with CrossOver on Linux was even much more stable than on Windows XP, because before many Service Packs have accumulated fixing tons of Windows XP bugs, it was not unusual for MS Office to crash, even if such events were much more rare than with older Windows versions, like Windows 98.
At least at that time when I was still using CrossOver, Wine supported well only older MS Office versions and had some problems with the latest.
Even if I have no longer needed their product for many years, CrossOver remains one of the few software products that I have purchased for which I consider that the price paid for it was completely worthwhile, because it did exactly what I needed and what I had expected.
To support the development of Wine and for ease of use?
Without CodeWeavers Wine wouldn’t be where it is today. They are the ones building your free and open solution. If it’s an important program for you, you should probably pay them.
You prompted me to look at their site and I definitely get your point.
The site was definitely more focused on what you described back in the days.
The site tells me that their business might have shifted to offer more consultation services for porting games and programs using Wine. If that’s true they might not need the Crossover revenue that badly anymore?
[1] = https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2024/2/22/crossove...