CodeWeavers Releases CrossOver 21 - Rebased On Wine 6.0

[phoronix]

Phoronix: CodeWeavers Releases CrossOver 21 - Rebased On Wine 6.0

CodeWeavers has announced the release of CrossOver 21.0 as the latest major update to their commercial software powered by Wine for running Windows games and applications on Linux and macOS...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=CrossOver-21.0-Released

[timofonic]

I don't understand the pragmatic reason to use Crossover instead Wine or one of the Wine-Staging supersets (such as TKG one), to be honest.

Can someone explain it to me? Please...

[perpetually high]

I don't understand the pragmatic reason to use Crossover instead Wine or one of the Wine-Staging supersets (such as TKG one), to be honest.

Can someone explain it to me? Please...

Codeweavers is a business. Crossover is one of their products. It's a superset of Wine, and they can offer features and support that the standalone project "Wine" cannot and will not support. I'm sure you are your own customer service, what about other people? Maybe they don't have the time or know-how to manage it.

You said pragmatic, but you meant more "what works for me" and I think there's a difference there.

Crossover makes sense for a lot of people, maybe just not you. And that's okay, too. The service and product exists for people who want to pay for it.

Here is how they market Crossover:

[AsciiWolf]

Does CrossOver support DXVK?

[gbcox]

Codeweavers is a business. Crossover is one of their products. It's a superset of Wine, and they can offer features and support that the standalone project "Wine" cannot and will not support. I'm sure you are your own customer service, what about other people? Maybe they don't have the time or know-how to manage it.

You said pragmatic, but you meant more "what works for me" and I think there's a difference there.

Good explanation... I'd only add..
They also have promotions from time to time, usually around Black Friday where they give good discounts for yearly renewals. Yeah, you could just go ahead and use Wine, but Crossover makes it extremely easy to manage any windows programs you have, in their own separate containers. It's basically a premium version of Wine, with easier installation and management and a few extra tweaks here and there. The big advantage is that you're helping fund the project - in return, you get a better overall experience.

[perpetually high]

Good explanation... I'd only add..
They also have promotions from time to time, usually around Black Friday where they give good discounts for yearly renewals. Yeah, you could just go ahead and use Wine, but Crossover makes it extremely easy to manage any windows programs you have, in their own separate containers. It's basically a premium version of Wine, with easier installation and management and a few extra tweaks here and there. The big advantage is that you're helping fund the project - in return, you get a better overall experience.

Thanks for adding. I might even consider purchasing Crossover on a discount. To me, convenience is everything. I may not need Crossover since I know my way around, but I'll see if it can add something worth the price tag.

Does CrossOver support DXVK?

From the blog post:

CrossOver 21 includes an update to Wine 6.0, bringing with it thousands of improvements to a variety of applications. One of the more exciting features of Wine 6.0 is the Vulkan backend for wined3d. This feature is on by default on macOS for 64-bit Direct3D 10/11 games if DXVK is not enabled. Our testing results have largely been positive, but we know of a few games that run with DXVK but do not currently run with wined3d. We also have found a few games that work with wined3d but not DXVK. Notably, NieR:Automata should run on all platforms with wined3d on CrossOver 21, and Skyrim Special Edition should be newly playable on M1 Macs with wined3d.

[torsionbar28]

I don't understand the pragmatic reason to use Crossover instead Wine or one of the Wine-Staging supersets (such as TKG one), to be honest.

Can someone explain it to me? Please...

I've been using Wine since probably 1996, so I've got a little experience with it. If your thing is doing loads of trial-n-error, manually tweaking config files, applying 3rd party patches, and really investing the time to research and optimize each Windows app individually to run properly under Wine... then stick with vanilla Wine.

If on the other hand, you want a "just works" experience, where no matter which game or app you want to run, you can click 'Install' and have it install and run properly, and basically "just work" out of the box, then you want Codeweavers Crossover.

Personally, having spent more than a few hours tinkering with Wine, I find the price of Crossover is totally worth it if you are regularly running any Windows apps and games on Linux.

[tildearrow]

I don't understand the pragmatic reason to use Crossover instead Wine or one of the Wine-Staging supersets (such as TKG one), to be honest.

Can someone explain it to me? Please...

One is support and warranty. The other is if you have a Mac with macOS Catalina or higher.

[uid313]

Will all of the improvements in CrossOver eventually trickle down to Wine?
How old is the oldest patch to CrossOver that have not yet trickled down to Wine?

[RemcoL]

Thanks for adding. I might even consider purchasing Crossover on a discount. To me, convenience is everything. I may not need Crossover since I know my way around, but I'll see if it can add something worth the price tag.

There is currently a promotion for 30% off because of the new release, see https://www.codeweavers.com/store/promotions

Will all of the improvements in CrossOver eventually trickle down to Wine?

The intention is to upstream everything, so the patchset is as small as possible. But they can take shortcuts for the product so that for example one program works with patches that would never be accepted upstream. And then they have a happy customer and time to clean it up for upstreaming.

How old is the oldest patch to CrossOver that have not yet trickled down to Wine?

The patched wine version is open source, so you can check what is in there and what is not in wine: https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover/source

I don't have the time to go check, but it would be an interesting question to get an answer to, especially with the reason why it's not upstream yet (besides time).