[HN Gopher] Codeweavers released CrossOver 24 today
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Codeweavers released CrossOver 24 today
Author : twickline
Score : 64 points
Date : 2024-02-22 17:45 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.codeweavers.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.codeweavers.com)
| actionfromafar wrote:
| They have a Life option, that was unexpected (to me). I will
| consider it when it's time to help a family member buy a
| computer...
|
| would be nice to be able to to install a Linux and yet have a
| maintained way to run Windows programs.
| malfist wrote:
| Does code weavers actually work any better than wine?
| trelane wrote:
| It kind of _is_ WINE.
|
| They are (the?) major contributors to WINE.
|
| https://www.codeweavers.com/wine
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWeavers
| actionfromafar wrote:
| 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.
| t8sr wrote:
| 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?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| _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.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| ReactOS is supposed to be able to use Windows drivers,
| IIRC, which definitely could be are advantage over Linux.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| 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.
| ActionHank wrote:
| I think this is an important question.
|
| Whilst I know they contributed a fair bit to Wine there is no
| clear indication why I would hand over my money vs get the free
| and open solution.
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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.
| lwkl wrote:
| 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.
| ActionHank wrote:
| Sure, if you want to be precious about it.
|
| My point was more that there should be something on the
| page to show me how it differentiates to add value for me
| as a customer.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Click a button, install a supported app with all the
| ideal tweaks already provided.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Because giving them money keeps the contributions to Wine
| flowing.
| toasteros wrote:
| 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.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| 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.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > 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.
| belthesar wrote:
| 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.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Yes, in my experience. But maybe wine is a lot better now. They
| just made wine work well, but it's still wine.
| mosselman wrote:
| 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.
|
| This is all free btw.
| trelane wrote:
| Does Apple upstream their modifications?
| ActionHank wrote:
| I mean, it's sweet that you asked.
| szundi wrote:
| Hope dies last
| a_vanderbilt wrote:
| 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.
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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.
| fastily wrote:
| I believe it was Wine they forked https://www.winehq.org/
| rafram wrote:
| 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.)
| qingcharles wrote:
| Anyone know if it is good enough to run Visual Studio?
| omgbear wrote:
| 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.
| azinman2 wrote:
| 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.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| 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.
| olliej wrote:
| Proton is Linux only and it seems crossover has a Big Mac
| focus so it's seems reasonable for them to match proton.
|
| [edit: I'm leaving the autocarrot capitalization of Big Mac
| in place :)]
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| 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.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Take a look at this: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.p
| hp?bIsQueue=false&bI...
|
| 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.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| Bloody hell, glad I didn't buy that recent Corel focused
| Humble Bundle on a whim. I was that close.
| Shawnecy wrote:
| I think the dedicated blog post for this release [1] would be a
| better link.
|
| [1] =
| https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2024/2/22/crossove...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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.)
| giomasce wrote:
| Yes, leveraging Rosetta 2. Most programs should work, some
| might have caveats.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| Really like the option to easily create a launcher for a command
| in a particular bottle.
|
| Is there a more elaborate release notes than what Shawnecy
| posted? Not trying to be hegative, but all in all this seems a
| little sparse...
|
| EDIT: I think I answered my own question [1], but seems like this
| is really about it...
|
| [1] https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover/changelog
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