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On 29/10/12 16:15, bad apple wrote:
On 29/10/12 15:59, Rob Beard wrote:Hi folks, Just seen this on Facebook, CodeWeavers are giving away a free copy of CrossOver with 12 months of support on 31st October 2012 (from 0:00 to 23:59 CST which I believe is about 5am UK time, although please do correct me if my maths are wrong :-P). There is more information about it here: http://www.codeweavers.com/flockthevote/ Could be useful for anyone who wants to run a specific Windows application on Linux and doesn't want to mess about with Wine. RobJust a heads up - other people's experiences may of course vary but purely from my own experiences, CrossOver is as much of a liability as a boon. There is nothing that can't be achieved by CrossOver that can't also be done by good old regular wine (worst case, you might need to update via PPA/repo/etc to get a really recent version with the latest bells and whistles). Wine is of course properly free, much more actively maintained and tweaked and infinitely more hackable. There are literally thousands of howtos and guides on the internet and the winedb usually has step by step info on pretty much every windows application you can possibly think of. CrossOver has never helped me more with the really big asks (CAD programs, Adobe CS, MS Office, etc) than wine.
Well I figured I'd post it, others on the list might be interested in giving it a go. I've only used it a couple of times, saying that these days I rarely use Wine.
Thanks to the advent of very powerful affordable hardware and the rise of virtualization technology I find myself using wine less and less anyway, but although YMMV, honestly, CrossOver is just a big fat waste of time, even if you don't have to pay for it. Incidentally, CrossOver rarely works out of the box like they say - you'll frequently find yourself hacking it about following obscure forum posts on their site and you will find yourself asking "why the hell aren't I just using wine again?".
Well there is that, but I find that the cost of a Windows license kinda puts me off getting Windows at home. Yeah, my laptop has a Vista licence but... ugh... nope, not installing that again :-P (and the rest of my machines are either built myself or purchased without a Windows licence).
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq