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.
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.