For those who want to help with Wine development without contributing code, CodeWeavers host the Wine project and contribute to its development along with their own CrossOver product.
For those who've never heard of it:
CrossOver provides two main services on top of Wine. 1) CrossOver contains a series of hacks that allow some popular programs to run better in the short-term. 2) CrossOver provides a user-friendly shell so that you don’t need to use a terminal and text-based commands to run your Windows software on Mac or Linux.
Released yesterday, CrossOver 18.5 is a pretty huge upgrade as it pulls in the Wine 4.0 release (previously it used Wine 3.14) and also FAudio, the XAudio reimplementation for open platforms developed by Ethan Lee who now works with CodeWeavers. The actual changelog can be found here and the release announcement here.
I can't say I know anyone who uses CrossOver for games, but for software it might come in handy, like with this release adding some support for OneNote 2016 and support for the latest latest release of Office 365. Good to have options though of course and since they support Wine directly it's a good way to help.
They also put up a blog post (where the above quote is from) to help with those confused on the relationship between Wine, CrossOver and Proton.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Mohandevir 22 Mar 2019
I made use of Cedega back when I was clanning playing BF1942 as I was switching 100% to linux. They just too wine, some tweaks (game specific)
Seems understandable at the time, but they didn't feed back to WINE and equally if the game you were interested in went out of scope then it just rotted. The £££ that linux users provided for this "service" then wass used to create Cedar for OSX only....
I have always been a bit questionable about CodeWeavers existence primarily due to CedegaWell, that was a completely different (and quite shady) company called TransGaming, nothing to do with CodeWeavers. CodeWeavers do give back, pretty sure the head person of Wine is literally employed by them.
I made use of Cedega back when I was clanning playing BF1942 as I was switching 100% to linux. They just too wine, some tweaks (game specific)
Seems understandable at the time, but they didn't feed back to WINE and equally if the game you were interested in went out of scope then it just rotted. The £££ that linux users provided for this "service" then wass used to create Cedar for OSX only....
I suppose I'd disagree that Transgaming was in any way "shady". I do agree they took a very odd path given they are now a real estate company IIRC.
I suppose I'd disagree that Transgaming was in any way "shady". I do agree they took a very odd path given they are now a real estate company IIRC.Maybe shady wasn't quite the right word, but I'm not a fan of how they took Wine code before the license change and profited off it while making their changes proprietary. Obviously it wasn't the best business model, since Wine changed their license and most people moved over to Wine eventually and Transgaming moved on themselves.
With that said, I find $40 for what you get way over priced and I've never been able to justify paying that much for what you get.
I've been using Lutris instead and I find it more useful for my needs. I even pay $5 a month to support it which is more than the $40 crossover asks for.
TheRiddick 22 Mar 2019
wintermute 22 Mar 2019
I've never been able to justify paying that much for what you get.
What you get is to help pay the wages of most of the regular contributors to Wine, I find that quite easy to justify (though I appreciate not everyone has the spare cash). For what it's worth they do have quite regular sales.
I use Crossover for some older games where stability has more benefits than being on the cutting edge.
Comandante Ñoñardo 23 Mar 2019
Does the fact that CrossOver now integrates Wine 4.0 means that Proton is near from getting it too? Isn't Proton CrossOver based?Valve is working with Codeweavers for proton but it does not use any crossover code that is not in wine as far as I know, it uses wine, dxvk and some other opensource projects. Proton will be based on wine 4.0 or newer when its fits protons development schedule.
Last edited by Redface on 24 Mar 2019 at 12:37 am UTC
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