Crossover Linux? No thanks!
As you all know Crossover Linux 8.0 was announced a few days ago. New and “exciting” features such as IE7 and Outlook 2007 support are presented as “major development” by the company’s CEO.
Sorry, but I have to strongly disagree. Come one, IE7? Not even IE8? And what’s with the poor gaming support? Counterstrike and Civilization IV? Is that all you can? Oh wait… There’s more, but most of them don’t work!
So why would someone pay for your product? To support wine? I’d agree with that, wine is a great project (being free and all) but that’s about it. It doesn’t run all Windows applications so why use it? I don’t need headaches and frustration, I have that already, so I prefer dual booting or using virtualization. I don’t want to have a native Windows environment on my machine. Wait…that is the actual Crossover goal??
Oh well…Here’s a screenshot with a successful IE7 installation. You won’t see that title for your favourite game.
June 24th, 2009 at 6:01 PM
Sorry you weren’t happy with our release. We’re currently working on more games, and will be polishing IE7 as well. IE8 is on the to-do list as well. This stuff isn’t easy.
-jon parshall-
COO
http://www.codeweavers.com
June 24th, 2009 at 6:25 PM
The reason I use crossover is so I can access the ONLY MS app I need at work. Outlook. Without it, I am stuck with a second machine running windows. Dual boot isn’t an option, and my company does lots of things to make sure outlook is the only mail client that works properly. (At least that I know of.) 2007 in crossover has a few missing things, but nothing I MUST have. I have been using now for quite a while and am very happy with it.
June 24th, 2009 at 6:48 PM
What a bunch of FUD. Crossover, and w.i.n.e. both support a good many software programs, both games and other applications. It has enabled me to take my family off of windoze at home on 4 seperate machines. Both by enabling the Office apps my kids are required to use at school, and the windows based games we’ve purchased over the years. Of my substantial gaming library (over 100 pc titles), the majority of them work using crossover. Granted, not all things do, but what does and doesn’t work is clearly outlined in the compatibility database. If it doesn’t support what you need, don’t buy it, if it does, it’s a good value. To each their own, but don’t assume that because it’s a bad fit for you that it’s a bad fit for everyone.
June 24th, 2009 at 8:28 PM
@Andrew: your company is paying for it so that’s different.
@Mike: How much would Crossover cost you for 4 PC’s? Wine is a different story and I pointed that out. I’m talking DX10 games here, not old games.
June 24th, 2009 at 9:55 PM
Crossover is horrible some programs run better under wine than in crossover.
with wine and playonlinux you do not need crossover if you want to support wine make a donation directly to them.
June 25th, 2009 at 1:11 AM
To the author: I don’t see the point of such destructive posts.
Crossover is useful to many persons, if you don’t like it yourself, why do you feel the need to write something negative about it?
Are there no positive and useful things you could write about?
June 25th, 2009 at 2:47 AM
@ Johannes
Please why don’t you write about the positive thing about crossover
June 25th, 2009 at 3:33 AM
Yes, because the ONLY thing we need is game support. Ever. Games will pay our bills and make us eat. Wow, you’re really stupid!
Crossover actually runs a lot of things that wine won’t at all, and might be exactly what some people need to switch. You think IE support is useless? Webmasters would disagree. What’s better? Paying for a windows license or for a cx license?
You SUCK.
June 25th, 2009 at 11:15 AM
Good point Frank, so here it is:
* From Wikipedia:
CodeWeavers employs several Wine developers and contributes code back to the free software/open source software Wine project as per the GNU LGPL, although CrossOver is proprietary software.
* Thanks to CodeWeavers, Wine has made enormous progress. Really.
* Don’t think only about yourself. Whereas geeks don’t, companies mostly DO NEED commercial support for applications they use. WINE does not do that. Codeweavers does.
* In my personal case: last March I installed Office 2007, which I needed, flawlessly on my Linux system, thanks to CrossOver. It was sooo easy, really. No need of a virtual machine or dual boot.
* IE8 is not supported, well, they’re surely working on it. Be patient! (BTW, what are you missing so much in IE7 vs IE8?) Instead of criticizing, if you need support for some software, you can help the WINE project with testing. Start here:
http://www.winehq.org/contributing
* You don’t HELP the community, and neither you help WINE, by criticizing CrossOver! So what’s the point?
All the best,
Johannes
PS. I’m not related whatsoever with Codeweavers.
June 25th, 2009 at 1:49 PM
I installed crossover games yesterday and immediately it was plagued with problems. It did not like my graphics setup (Im using ati catalyst), it didn’t show the error screen therefore it just did nothing (I had to pkill cxglsetup via pkill before it would move on to installing a game) and then the game I wanted to play was just a mess. Definitely works better in current version of wine, but really doesnt work at all (just less mangled). But having said that I can play the only game I play in VirtualBox. Virtual is better than wine and crossover put together. I think (and this is really my 2 cents worth) that wine has had its day with the introduction of virtual.
June 25th, 2009 at 6:29 PM
Some additional comments.
@Mike and @Admin: “How much would Crossover cost you for 4 PC’s?” Answer: as long as it’s just you using those 4 PCs, that’s one license. We don’t sell our products using Microsoft’s “every piece of glass (and then some) must have a license” model–we think it’s silly and onerous.
@Admin re: “@Andrew: your company is paying for it so that’s different.” Huh? Not to mention, why does that matter? It’s doubtful that his company is paying for his copy of CrossOver. But his plight is the same as a lot of business users that try to use Macs in the corporate world: you can’t be a corporate drone without Outlook. And CrossOver provides a pretty good solution for running Outlook, and one that requires no MS OS license.
@Frank: “Crossover is horrible some programs run better under wine than in crossover.”
That’s always been the case. Wine tends to be a little more bleeding edge than CrossOver; that’s an intentional design decision on our part. Why? In Wine, from day to day, you can never tell what will run, because a patch from a given developer may fix Applications A, B, and C, but coincidentally breaks Outlook (that you happen to need). And guess what: that situation may not change for months, because free Wine (rightly) is agnostic regarding which applications it temporarily breaks in the name of forward progress.
CodeWeavers is not agnostic. We take in all of free Wine’s improvements. But we are selective about which of them we incorporate, and when. So, while we’re essentially identical to free Wine, there are some important differences from free Wine from release to release of CrossOver. Which means that if you buy CrossOver, you can be reasonably sure that Outlook will continue running release after release as well. That’s part of our value add. And if it doesn’t run, you can get tech support. That’s another part of the value add, and one which a lot of our users who aren’t tech savvy enough to want to mess with Wine directly take advantage of.
Re: “if you want to support wine make a donation directly to them.”
Which is just fine with us, of course. Direct donations to Wine get used to help sponsor things like WineConf. But those donations don’t get distributed as paychecks to anybody. Bear in mind, too, that CodeWeavers does a lot of the “heavy lifting” around this technology. We employ the majority of the really superb Wine developers in the Project. If you want to make sure that those people continue eating, then buying a copy of CrossOver puts money *directly* into their paycheck. That’s folks like Alexandre Julliard (Wine’s Maintainer), Stefan Dossinger and Henri Verbeet (who have done a lot of great work on game support), Aric Stewart (who’s implemented double-byte support), and Hans Leidekker and Rob Shearman (who built the basis for MS Office 2007 and Outlook 2007 to run decently. Not to mention our other fine developers who toil behind the scenes on all sorts of evil, arcane infrastructure issues. Your copy of CrossOver directly feeds all those folks and their families, located in ten different countries. We very much appreciate our customers’ continued support of our collective livelihoods, and we work hard to earn that support (despite the warts and flaws in our product that we, too, are keenly aware of.)
@Crassone: sorry the game you wanted didn’t run. Feel free to put in a support ticket, and we’ll see if we can help you.
@Johannes re: “IE8 is not supported, well, they’re surely working on it. Be patient!” We are indeed working on it, and we wish it would drop faster than it has. The unfortunate reality is that some of the more complex applications take literally man-*months* worth of work to get running well. Wine is h-a-r-d. But the good news is that all that hard work on IE8 will undoubtedly have a positive impact on a host of other applications as well, just as our improved support for the more recent .NET frameworks has had a positive impact on a host of unsupported applications that we know nothing about. Thanks, Johannes; we’re trying to be patient ourselves, and it ain’t easy sometimes.
Best Wishes,
-jon parshall-
COO
http://www.codeweavers.com
June 26th, 2009 at 4:34 AM
IE8 , what the heck, the only thing somebody would want in IE line is perhaps, IE compatibility, because some shitty web developers are too lazy to provide compatibility with other browsers or they build their security model around it, for this only reason , if they some IE6 we’re good to go, firefox is better in every other way, and if they have IE7 compatibility now, we have a product matured 5 years in advance, moreover wine is good, and with support from crossover it’s great, I can’t see a reason why are you whining, even my OEM installed Vista SP1 machine couldn’t run DX10 titles which sure run flawlessly on Win XP, so that’s the fault of microsoft and their policies, I like windows, but the moment they pre-loaded my Dell machine with Vista they make me a total convert, and I don’t miss a single thing from that day.
June 26th, 2009 at 2:48 PM
@Vatbhav RE: “IE8 , what the heck, the only thing somebody would want in IE line is perhaps, IE compatibility, because some shitty web developers are too lazy to provide compatibility with other browsers or they build their security model around it”
Or if you are a website developer and run only linux and have no access to a windows machine.
June 26th, 2009 at 4:11 PM
Virtualization takes up resources – much much more than CX or Wine does.
Running a virtual for one application (for example Outlook) is a huge waste of resources.
I run Linux exclusively on every machine I use – personal and office. We are moving to Exchange at work, and while Evolution has an Exchange plugin, it’s not ready for primetime. I have a need to run outlook.
I do not have a need to run a full virtual machine for one application.
Crossover Works.
@crassone
If you are a website developer and need to develop using IE-specific code, then you should be running Windows (or a virtual machine with Windows). Even Firefox under linux sometimes has weird rendering issues which will not look the same under Win.
June 26th, 2009 at 6:50 PM
@niteHawk : I run ies4linux that uses wine (I,m sure you know) to test css code in ie5-6. I already use VirtualBox to see what the site looks like in ie7. As for resources, personally I have enough to be able to run VirtualBox, especially on the occasional basis that I need it, although I agree that its a resource hogger. If I could run ie7 and ie8 in wine and play the game I want, I would!
July 6th, 2009 at 2:28 AM
I count 8 applications on my Red Hat Linux desktop that run using Crossover that I use regularly, most of which are not officially supported by Crossover but run very well anyway. To me, the ability to run WinZip 10 from Linux, by itself, is well worth the cost of Crossover, as I often use WinZip encryption. Codeweavers allows one to download a free fully-functional copy of Crossover for evaluation. It doesn’t run all Windows apps (doesn’t run WinZip 12, for example) but it is worth the money for those apps that it does run. Your bashing of Crossover is way out of line.
July 15th, 2009 at 11:00 PM
If Wine or Crossover can’t run MS Office then I don’t really see the point. All the recent versions of Office apps have silver or bronze ratings. Without solid MS Office support I can hardly imagine there’s much of a business case. What good is support if the product just doesn’t work? MS Office 2007 has been out for 3 years and it still doesn’t work rock-solid in Wine or Crossover. That’s just not good enough to charge money for – I don’t care how hard of an engineering challenge it is. Virtualization is the obvious choice if you want to be able to run Office and know that it will work. Wine is just a toy – a cool toy though.