CrossOver Support - Community Forums

I do not know if this has been discussed before or if it is even a consideration but it would be great if we could select the version of wine we want to use in our bottle.
This is obviously feasible software-wise, since it is already implemented in PlayOnLinux. I know this would probably create some support and business issues but as a power user I would very much like to have it.

It could be an unsupported feature if you don't want to mess with dealing with the added issue of compatibility checks. In essence each crossover version would have a version of wine that has been checked against and is officially supported but a user may choose to use another version of wine that is not supported.
Thus you could keep all the infrastructure app rankings, forum/email support, but also have the added functionality.

I know this might cause some business model issues. For example why would I upgrade crossover next year when I could just change the underlying wine. But for this also there are solutions. For example this feature might work for as long as there is an active subscription so I cannot exploit it to to avoid paying you guys again next year for the new version of crossover.

This is very important for people that use crossover mainly to play games(which I presume are most of your private users). Usually the latest wine version is very far ahead from crossover wine version and I end up using something else (such as playonlinux) for newer games(such as guild wars 2) when I just want to have it all nice and tidy inside crossover.

Thoughts?

The problem I see personnally is that I know Crossover doesn't actually use Wine "as is" like playonlinux. Further, Crossover offers some stability which is very important if you use it in a production system. So having the latest greatest of Wine isn't exactly the point. In other words, Crossover isn't just some nice GUI over Wine. Crossover does bring stuff to the table which Wine will see only later too, so the catch-up game isn't always one-sided.

So I have both Wine and Crossover and I see them as different in use. I use Wine for cutting edge experimenting and Crossover for stable production use. I'm not sure I would even care to fool around with less stable Wine versions in Crossover. As you have said, if you want that, there is still playonlinux.

I do undestand your point of having a choice of Wine versions, but if that were the point, Crossover would be playonlinux.

Hey Constantinos,

Thanks for writing. This is indeed a feature we have mulled on from time to time, but there are a number of complications from a business model standpoint. Obviously, from a support standpoint, it makes things more difficult to diagnose, as you have to ask the user, well, what Wine version are you using now? Likewise, there's a sense that the latest version of Wine should, as much as possible, be the best version available. And if we're seeing that Older Version X runs Application Y better than the current Wine version, well, then, we should fix it.

From what I understand, you can actually do what you're proposing right now and change the Wine prefix on your bottle. However, if you're not technically savvy enough to know how to do this, don't! Likewise, be aware that if you do tread this path, you will most likely screw up your existing bottle in some obtuse way, and should thus make a backup before you do so.

Also, surprisingly, game users are not our primary users. Not even close. By far the most used applications under CrossOver remain productivity applications, like MS Office, and other stuff like that. That's not to say that games aren't an important section of users as well. But they're not the majority.

Cheers,

-jon parshall-
COO
www.codeweavers.com

I can testify that Although I'm a gamer, I mostly use software for work.

Crossover allows me to have my laptop under Linux and still go about working, even with windows only software, in a very stable fashion. I really like Crossover as is, but I do understand a gamer which thinks otherwise. 😉

Thank you guys for the answers.
As I understand that multiple wine versions would be a nightmare to support, that is why I proposed that only the stable crossver wine version should be supported officially and the rest would be just as an additional feature to easily change the wine prefix.
Thus the "enterprise" users would still enjoy the stability that a crossover product offers and also give the "private" users a way to change the wine version in a user-friendly safe way.
At any rate this is just a proposition/would-like-to-see feature because it would make a gamer's life easier being able to select which wine runs in which bottle, since different games run better on different versions of wine.
Of course I understand what you are saying and your concerns with this.