The easy, Wine way to run Windows apps on Linux

A bit misleading, the article is mainly about wine-extensions like CrossOver Linux. As a wine-only user (on Gentoo), I have to say using Wine isn't (sadly) that easy. I always use winesetuptk to set up wine, that's not the big hassle, but the errors one can get when trying to run actual Windows programs can be. On the other hand, I'm glad to see CrossOverLinux makes life easier for people wanting it, and as I understand, a lot of the CrossOver team development-efforts end up in (the free) wine too, since they are the major corporate wine-backer (as they say themselves).

> a lot of the CrossOver team development-efforts end up in (the free) wine

So they keep saying, but, from the continuing difficulties with wine, someone is dropping the ball. Either those contributions are pretty much insignificant, or, the wine developers aren't making very effective use of them. My take is that crossover is just touting the contributions as a publicity stunt and keeping anything significant for their own profit.

> and keeping anything significant for their own profit.

Well, Crossover's bread and butter is making Office and other specific programs (Quicken, for example) work under Linux . Giving them the benefit of a doubt, a lot of that is going to require program specific fixes which won't be applicable to general purpose Windows support. So, I suspect anything they think will be generally useful does make it back into Wine, but anything which is specific to the programs they support doesn't.

> anything which is specific to the programs they support doesn't.

Lol, what spin....

Uhhm, well, I remember even Microsoft had a hard time of making fixes in Windows itself, to fix bugfixes in 3d party software. Simcity is a known example of this: the programmers of Simcity produced a bug in Simcity, and Windows was changed to patch the bug in Simcity! (Well, they changed their mentality at Microsoft, today they don't care a **** about backwards compatibility and making buggy software work anymore). If Microsoft had a hard time, so will CrossOverOffice (in the real spirit of closed source, they are re-fixing the buggy and broken wheel Microsoft fixed before). And, still a bit in that closed spirit, CrossOverOffice might not be that committed to share those refixes, in order to make other devel's re-re-invent the wheel to re-re-fix things. Oh, I like closed source! It's so much cheaper in TCO...

> And, still a bit in that closed spirit

I begin to resent those 'semi-committed' companies, maybe even more than the proprietary ones. At least we know what to expect from proprietary.

> Lol, what spin....

As I said, Jim, just giving them the benefit of a doubt. I prefer to do so until things prove otherwise. If they were actually that bad, I'd think the Wine folks would be upset with them, and I've seen no indication that's the case.

What are you all talking about. I've run WINE with an without Crossover, all Crossover does it make it easier to install Windows applications. I change the underlying WINE modules every time a new stable one becomes available. All Crossover does is make changes to the configuration files.