Does code weavers actually work any better than wine?
What you get here is Wine and some level of guarantee that what you want to run will run. The focus is on applications rather than games.
Codeweavers contributes back to Wine upstream. Most changes that go into the Crossover fork of Wine end up in the main source tree, so this is a very good way of supporting Wine development and getting something out of it, but if all you're doing is playing games then you're mostly covered by Proton.
When Win10 EOLs I think CrossOver will be very important for allowing organisations to keep MS Office.
That's the idea in theory, although I recall the one time I actually reached out with a Windows app that was unresponsive in Linux, the support guy just kinda shrugged on the ticket and nothing came of it.
I get that they have finite resources, but that wasn't exactly the level of support I was hoping for from a product I'm paying for. I still do pay for it (usually whenever I can get a promo discount on renewal), but I'm resigned to the idea that it will really only help on popular Windows applications.
Huh? If they're running windows 10 and Office don't you think they'll just upgrade to windows 11 instead of using emulation?
Organisations are on a ~3-4 year upgrade cycle and any computer made in the last 4 years from 2025 when windows 10 goes Eol will be able to run windows 11.
They are (the?) major contributors to WINE.
That could probably replace some embedded uses of Windows.
The only thing you get by running ReactOS instead of Linux is... worse performance, worse hardware support and possibly a kernel based on leaked copyrighted code. What's the point?
But way back when, before everything computing metastased into a fluffy Javascript cloud world, and when Linux wasn't as mature, an "Open Source Windows NT 4" would have been a great off-ramp off Microsoft. You know, "Year of Linux on the Desktop" which was such a coveted thing, could have been "Year of Open Source Win32" instead.
Instead, the Desktop waned in importance, we got cloud services and smart phones instead, and Linux grew up to be a force in its own right.
It's a fairly coherent system that is willing to not be *nix and really offers some serious power just under the hood.
Having something like that open-source would be a step closer to my dream machine.
ReactOS is still targeting 32 bit Windows at a time when even Linux is dropping support for 32 bit hardware.
ReactOS is FreeDOS whereas WINE is DosBox.
By default, it makes brand new prefixes, has profiles for well known apps to configure the prefixes accordingly, including managing downloading the installers.
Their fixes and changes to their version of WINE are almost always upstreamed, so eventually you do get those features in OSS WINE, but that's honestly never been the reason to get it. It's the much more friendly UX, and for those using WINE in business environments, a channel to get support for the framework.
For those that want better prefix management for their home projects, there are plenty of OSS projects doing that now. Whisky for macOS, and Bottles for Linux are two fine alternatives to help keep WINE prefix hygiene without it, but neither come with the "we can install this business app for you with no hassle" concierge features.
These folks do know WINE well though. There's a reason they're working with Valve on Proton, and why so many of the commits to WINE come from them.
Whilst I know they contributed a fair bit to Wine there is no clear indication why I would hand over my money vs get the free and open solution.
Nevertheless, before that I have used Codeweavers CrossOver for some years, mainly to run MS Office on Linux.
During that time I have been very satisfied with Codeweavers CrossOver, because the latest MS Office Professional versions available in those years were running under Linux at least as stable as under Windows and for some operations they were even faster than under Windows (presumably due to the faster file system).
Earlier, during the Windows XP days, running MS Office Professional with CrossOver on Linux was even much more stable than on Windows XP, because before many Service Packs have accumulated fixing tons of Windows XP bugs, it was not unusual for MS Office to crash, even if such events were much more rare than with older Windows versions, like Windows 98.
At least at that time when I was still using CrossOver, Wine supported well only older MS Office versions and had some problems with the latest.
Even if I have no longer needed their product for many years, CrossOver remains one of the few software products that I have purchased for which I consider that the price paid for it was completely worthwhile, because it did exactly what I needed and what I had expected.
Without CodeWeavers Wine wouldn’t be where it is today. They are the ones building your free and open solution. If it’s an important program for you, you should probably pay them.
My point was more that there should be something on the page to show me how it differentiates to add value for me as a customer.
The site was definitely more focused on what you described back in the days.
The site tells me that their business might have shifted to offer more consultation services for porting games and programs using Wine. If that’s true they might not need the Crossover revenue that badly anymore?