[wplug] Free crossover office

[Ted Rodgers]

>> What is wrong with Wine?

Wine works perfectly well for a good many applications.  Crossover
office is a derivative and proprietary version of wine, so it is not
free in either sense of the word.  But, Codeweavers does contribute
code back to the wine sourcecode, too, so they are in fact helping out
the free version, too; plus, the last I knew, several developers
working on the wine project were employees working with the Crossover
project, meaning Codeweavers was supporting wine in more ways than
one.

There are advantages to running Crossover for some folks, too.  It
comes with an installer where you can click to install many popular
application titles (i.e. photo software, office suites, games, and
more).  This lets the most users get reasonable settings for their
application and Crossover has an internal template to determine which
libraries to override to get some tricky titles to perform well or run
stable.  And for businesses, especially one with more than a few PC's,
Crossover has pro versions tuned for stability.  Plus, they offer
support.

So what are the disadvantages then?  Normally price is one, but for
the giveaway this doesn't apply.  The normal price for Crossover isn't
especially steep and possibly worth it for some users just to avoid
the frustration of getting certain difficult applications to work with
a couple clicks.  One could do much worse than paying for software
made for Linux, too.  With wine you can view, edit, modify, and audit
the source code and if you program, you can also submit patches back
to upstream to help on the source (or volunteer in other ways).  One
downside to wine is that you may need to wait longer to get newest
versions of software to work with it or dig around forums to find
tricks others have used.

That said, which do I use?  I usually use neither one. But wine has
very few times failed me when I've felt the need to game "non-free"
(Diablo or Elderscrolls type games).  On the flipside, though,
Turbotax usually installs without pain on Crossover and isn't always
so easy (or possible) to roll yourself using a free wine bottle.