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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

Any word on support for 32 bit Windows applications on MacOS Catalina?

Last I checked it was in a very early stage, so I wouldn't expect anything anytime soon. Here's the relevant discussion: https://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=32590

You can downgrade to MacOS with proper 32-bit support, purchase Crossover 19, or ask Apple to put the libraries back in so tons of software people paid for continues to work.

> ask Apple to put the libraries back in so tons of software people paid for continues to work

Reversing course on this would be very against Apple's longstanding m.o. of breaking backwards compatibility with every new OS version. Looking forward is how they make the rest of the world advance at the expense of a lot of bloodied bodies left on the floor.

Fortunately Catalina is still such a disaster for me (I’ve had to downgrade twice since I stupidly tried to upgrade twice) that Mojave might be my Snow Leopard v2. I wish Windows ran better in boot camp, I’d jump off macOS indefinitely if I could.

Runs ok for me, what are the issues?

My laptop reliably kernel panics every night.

Mine started doing that too a few weeks ago and I'm on Mojave, so I don't think it's a Catalina thing.

I don’t know, it never happens on Mojave, reliably happens on Catalina, and stops when I downgrade back to Mojave. I’m not sure what the actual cause is but I also have no desire to actually try and find out.

Just FYI... this started happening to me when I upgraded to Catalina and it turned out that it was a hardware failure, not the OS. Apparently, Mojave didn't do some kind of check that now happens in Catalina and so Catalina caught the hardware failure that Mojave wasn't catching. You may want to test your RAM and/or drives to make sure they're not failing or about to fail.

I believe the main reason Apple wanted to drop support for 32-bit apps is so they no longer have to support the Objective-C 1.0 runtime, which must’ve been requiring more work to maintain than they wanted to invest.

I believe the changes for that both came after the 5.0 feature freeze and also involved compiler hacks that winehq aren't very comfortable with. For now you can pay for CrossOver to get that functionality.

Yes, CrossOver 19 supports 32-bit Windows applications on macOS Catalina, but upstream Wine does not. There is a free trial of CrossOver available.

High level overview of how it works: https://www.codeweavers.com/about/blogs/jschmid/2019/9/10/so...

This thread has the technical details: https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2019-December/15...

Another option if you don't mind disabling SIP. Don't know how well it works: https://github.com/Gcenx/WineskinServer

> WS11WineCX19.0.1 & WS11WineCX64Bit19.0.1 include wine32on64 and can function on macOS Catalina but these have not been signed or notarized so to make use of these you need to disable SIP in order for wine32on64 to set the kernal flag to allow 32Bit code execution.

I don't believe this is in the release version of Crossover atm?

> I don't believe this is in the release version of Crossover atm?

32-on-64 support on macOS, you mean? I assure you, it is. https://www.codeweavers.com/about/blogs/jwhite/2019/12/10/ce...

Oh, nvm!

I’m running 32bit windows apps using the Crossover by Codeweavers. I just bought the lifetime license, figured it was time they get some reward for all their hard work.

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