CrossOver runs your Windows apps on Mac or Linux computers

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/01/28/crossover-runs-your-windows-ap.html

Crossover is just a slick, friendly GUI for Wine. By all means, buy it for the paid tech support and customer service if those are important to you, but first try your app in Winebottler or Wineskin (which are free) to see if it works or not. If the amount of fuckery involved in getting the app to work in one of those is too high, then it will be a PITA to get it to work in Crossover, too.

Winebottler is by far the most user-friendly free Wine implementation for the Mac. Wineskin has a Linux version, though.

As a general rule of thumb, Wine can handle apps that are a few years old OK. Don’t expect it to work well with very recent versons of Office or with something requiring dotnet 4+.

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If this is true, and I have no reason to believe it’s not, then I seriously doubt there’s no performance hit, either. While I haven’t tried Wine in some years, the last time I used it the apps were definitely much slower than they were on Windows. Of course, there’s the possibility Wine has just gotten that much better, but I’m not inclined to believe that given its history.

Also, I’ve become quite comfortable and pleased with native Linux apps, but then, I’m not much of a gamer.

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I recently used Winebottler successfully.

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Well, it’s a step beyond just the customer service: Crossover tries to make games and such work, from a database made from other people’s efforts.
Wineskin has more options, but doesn’t help you at all. So unless somebody on a forum somewhere has had the same problems and made a suite of adjustments for you to DL, you’ve gotta figure it out on your own.

There is a performance hit, but it’s about 1000% less annoying than the care and feeding of a full fledged Windows VM, so unless it’s an app where performance is key, it’s worth trying to see if it will work.

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Or you could just, you know, dual boot Window/Linux or Windows/Mac and have a shared partition on the drive that both can read…

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Thanks, but I’m having enough trouble getting Windows to run Windows apps. Every update, I lose another one.

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Much like the bullet with your name on it, there’s a Linux problem somewhere that’s all yours and yours alone (actually, I seem to have accumulated a bunch, but I’m too lazy/they’re not annoying enough yet to just reinstall and pray…).

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Anyone else think the logo looks like a Tide Pod?

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I was going to say, that logo is designed to appeal to the Tide Pod set.

Fixed that for you

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Logo looks familiar.

I’ve been looking but strangely there is little info if newer versions of 3ds max work using this.

Although I did read a comment above which said this is basically a WINE wrapper, so I guess if WIN E runs 3ds max, I’d be good.

Anyone know about Adobe products (Photoshop/Illustrator) and Maple/Matlab?

Maple/Matlab has mac and linux native versions according to the Internets.

Adobe products aren’t very popular amongst those who run linux, for some very good reasons. Typically people run the linux alternatives (like for example GiMP instead of photoshop).

@orenwolf this should have closed 9 days ago.

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