Jeremy White And Mad Penguin On CrossOver Office 3

SilentBob4 writes "Today, a review of CrossOver Office 3 (written by Preston St. Pierre) as well as an interview with the founder of CodeWeavers Inc., Jeremy White (written by Adam Doxtater) have been published for mass consumption. It looks like CrossOver Office/Wine has come a long way since the dark ages of Linux science. Congratulations to the developers on both teams on a job well done. The interview with Jeremy is better than any I have seen recently."

Comments

do we still need it?

[xlyz]

I feel less and less the need to run Windows software

Re:Wine

[j0hndoe]

Actually because Wine is LGPL, Codeweavers is forbidden to make proprietary changes to the main codebase (and they supported this change, it used to be a more liberal license). All the really do is package it up, make nice installers, provide support, same as any other "good" company based on FOSS software.

MS Office has been runnable with Wine for years, so your argument kinda goes down the drain.

Re:Hmmm.. Makes me think of OS/2

[arvindn]

No it won't. This has repeatedly been gone over before. The difference compared to OS/2 is the community. Do you think all of us linux zealots are going to stop writing apps if wine becomes good enough? :-)

There might be a slight tendency for commercial software vendors to not bother porting their apps to linux because of wine, but that's becoming harder and harder as linux edges closer to critical mass. And with heavyweights like IBM and Novell behind linux, I wouldn't be too worried.

Too little, too late.

[panamahank]

In looking at the list of Gold apps, and those are the only ones that matter since partial functionality sucks, I don't see a single app that I need that isn't already done well enough by Linux. It would be nice if they had fully functional Access compatibility, since one of my customers has subscribed to a service that uses an Access database, and records can only be downloaded in Access format. It really sucks to have to have a dual-boot computer just to convert those records.

Crossover is a serious application.

[aussersterne]

I am a former "wine hater" who was never able to get it to do anything useful. It turns out that a large part of making Windows applications work properly in wine is managing the registry and which libraries will be native/non-native for each application.

This is Crossover's value-add to wine: it takes care of all of the wine details for you, so that you don't have to be a wine coder with all of the detailed Windows .DLL and registry knowledge that implies, just to make Windows applications work.

I have to use MS Office XP for my work in print media and publishing. I also need Photoshop from time to time, though with GIMP 2.0 this need is greatly reduced.

MS Office XP, Internet Explorer, Photoshop, and Windows Media Player all work perfectly under Crossover with Wine. I will never have to use Win4Lin or VMWare again or cope with a full Windows desktop again!

Now that I have seen wine actually work, and work brilliantly, I believe in it to a much greater degree.