A Write up on my thoughts on Crossover Games VS Normal Wine

[OrbJinzo]

So for the last week ive been doing some testing on Crossover Games and Wine for certain games. Before you come out and say its all the same and stuff I would beg to differ.

First off I think Crossover games is tad smarter in detection of the games its support and some that arent. Alright ill list the games i tried and my thoughts on running then from both formats.

At the time of this writing wine is at the 1.1.16 and crossover is 7.2.0


Team Fortress 2/Counter Strike:Source/Day of Defeat Source:

Wine: As usual its a pain to install steam with wine. Font smoothing isnt on by default and the games would randomly crash with the recommended setup from the wine HQ appDB site. If you didnt understand basic computer knowlodge you would prolly get frustrated with this method.

Crossover: Steam was actually easy to install with the GUI they provided. Font smoothing is on by default and you could easily see the server text and the GUI text. Amazingly I have not once have the games crash at all.
It worked quite well on all fronts/

World of Warcraft:

Wine: Its pretty simple to install WoW if dont suffer from the EULA button regression. The game ran smooth as butter and didnt have any flaws.

Crossover: I tested 3 verisons of Crossover to see if the regression would pop up and it hasnt. So I would assume that they went out of there way to polish the product for people. The Game ran fine and some the features that I personally had a bad time setting up in wine seemed to work in crossover.


Ok With this being said and knowning that Codeweaves and Wine Project are almost the same thing I think that if you personally wanna game on linux I would spend the money and get crossover. I think in my exepernice that Crossover seems to be more intellgent then wine and can detect the best settings for most of the games you run. However though if you wanna go all natural and wanna using Wine its the same just you gotta do the setu work yourself and it might crash or not run at all.

[cogadh]

Who said CrossOver was the same thing as Wine? CodeWeavers is a supporter of the Wine project and they contribute a lot back to Wine from CrossOver (both money and code), but there is still quite a bit in CrossOver that is not in Wine, especialy with the games version.

For me personally, even though CrossOver may have easier to obtain results than Wine, all of the games I run work just fine in Wine and I'm a cheap *******, so CrossOver isn't worth it to me. Even if CrossOver didn't get better results with some games, I would say that CrossOver is totally worth it for the Linux/Wine newbie, as its ease of use is its biggest and best feature.

[betrunkenaffe]

Odd, I ran both those games through wine 1.1.14 without any problems, Steam gave me issues in that it hates computers but that's more of a Steam problem. Never had either crash, only config I had to do was add the opengl flag to wow.

[OrbJinzo]

Who said CrossOver was the same thing as Wine? CodeWeavers is a supporter of the Wine project and they contribute a lot back to Wine from CrossOver (both money and code), but there is still quite a bit in CrossOver that is not in Wine, especialy with the games version.

For me personally, even though CrossOver may have easier to obtain results than Wine, all of the games I run work just fine in Wine and I'm a cheap *******, so CrossOver isn't worth it to me. Even if CrossOver didn't get better results with some games, I would say that CrossOver is totally worth it for the Linux/Wine newbie, as its ease of use is its biggest and best feature.

they both use the same code base but i think in terms of making something easier crossover wins.

[ajackson]

I always view Crossover as Wine with a bit of spit & polish plus a few hacks that can't go into mainstream Wine. For the supported apps/games they take most of the fiddly set up bits away from the user and everything is presented in a nice GUI so it is less intimidating for a lot of users.

The money they make from sales & support helps employ some of the coders whose work often ends up back in Wine so I think of Crossover as beneficial to Wine, Cedega on the otherhand, well the less said the better :)

[cogadh]

they both use the same code base but i think in terms of making something easier crossover wins.
Not entirely accurate. Yes, the core basics of both are the same, but CrossOver includes code that either hasn't made it into Wine yet or never will (not just the GUI) and sometimes Wine includes code that is more experimental than what you would ever find in CrossOver (i.e. code not done by CodeWeavers). This is why you will often find things that work differently with CrossOver than they do with Wine. For example networking, which tends to work perfectly with CrossOver, while with Wine, its a bit hit or miss.

[OrbJinzo]

Ok ill give you that but Ive done it both ways and especially with steam Ive had alot problems with it. I bought and installed Crossover and Steam actually works decently and ive been happily playing tf2 on it :)