wine vs crossover... <SOLVED>

[vliscony]

I had one app that I cannot get in any kind of a linux version... so I ran it on Wine for a while, until it started misbehaving. It would flash on the screen when I started it, but not stay. Uninstall, reinstall, no improvement. Finally I gave up and downloaded the trial version of Crossover, and lo and behold, it's working fine for me again.

I have a few other apps I still run on a windows machine, so they are going to come over now.
Just curious about comments, but it's always disconcerting when something works for a long time and then it breaks for unexplained reasons.

[Pierre]

so - I've been down that road, as well.

- messed around with PoL as well as with the ./wine project itself.
some things worked well, and others didn't.

finally, during one of my web searches, I'd discovered the Codeweavers site,
and their Crossover software, and their version of the ./wine project did seem to work better.

later on, I'd discovered that the the Codeweavers company is the principle supporter
of the ./wine project - - which I'd thought was rather neat.

Yeah - - their product is Commercial Software & there is some folks who have an issue with that,
but - - I've been a paying supporter of their product for several years now,
and did get quite active in getting their product to work on some software that I've an interest in.

as well as that, I've also come to the opinion that I'd should be supporting the LinuxMint project,
and a few other related Linux products & so that is where I'm willing to pull out my wallet
and shell out some $$$ for those Linux Projects.

[AndyMH]

I recently made the switch from wine to crossover. I suspect for the reason that the majority of people do - ms office. Now happily running word and excel2013, whereas the best I could do under wine was 2007. Installing stuff under xover is lot less painful than wine. Think the cost was worthwhile and at £38 not expensive. Had also spotted before I switched that they are the major funding contributor to wine

Note that not everything will run better under xover, I've one application - home designer 6.0 (a 3D house design package) which runs flawlessly under wine but has a minor bug under xover (the guys at xover suggested the solution was to regress to an earlier version of xover). Interestingly, it has an even worse bug running under win7 (it was originally developed for either xp or 98).

Also a contributor to mint, it's a superb product and if we want to see it develop and get even better - well the team have to earn a living don't they?

[majpooper]

Hi Andy,

I run a T430 i7 LM 18.3 Cinnamon as well - runs great.
I am just glad I finally found ways to run exclusively native linux apps on my laptop and desktop. But I realize that is not always possible. My experience with wine and Crossover back when I was relatively new to linux and running Ubuntu was a nightmare to the extent I was either dual booting or running Windows in a VM - neither of which was completely satisfying.

[AndyMH]

majpooper, did you fit the i7 yourself or did it come with it? I think I've pimped my T430 to the max what with upgrading to an i7, 16GB RAM, 1TB HDD in the ultrabay (as backup to the 500G SSD which is the main drive). Also stuck a sim card in (which I didn't know it had a slot for until a few weeks ago - access when no wifi). Better than a lot of today's new laptops. Anyway, drifting a bit off-topic

Wine was a bit of a pain when I switched from the T410 to the T430 - found I had to install everything under a 32bit wine prefix (which at that point, knew nothing about). After 30 years of using word and excel, I'm not about to change horses. In addition to xover, I've also got win7 in a VM running office 2016 - but that's for work. I would say that if you are newbie, xover is far easier, but of course you pay.

[Kilz]

I bought crossover a few years ago. It worked ok for a bit, but updates to software installed in it started to give me problems. I tried wine staging, and it has worked better for some applications. After using Linux for 10 years, I have learned a few tricks, and one is google and google again. Sooner or later you will find a way to make something work under plain old wine.