Enough people need Crossover that they employ several people to work on it and Wine full time. Others find it very useful, so they help out. What's the problem?

It's probably a project that is helping at least hundreds of thousands of people (maybe even millions), and it is getting quite mature, so I don't see any reason not to do it.

I have to agree. I think it's a great, and much needed, project but I discovered that just beefing up my hardware a little and running Windows on VirtualBox was cheaper in the end. Many applications don't work out of the box, and require all sorts of twists and turns to get them working, if at all possible.

Until Virgil3D is mature enough this approach is no starter for games.

> running Windows on VirtualBox was cheaper in the end

"cheaper"? Wine is free software, whereas to run Windows you need a Windows license.

Your time is never "free".

Time and money are not seamlessly convertible at all, so, if this was the intended meaning of the comment, I think "cheaper" is misleading in comparison with e.g. "faster", "easier", "more efficient", "less time-consuming"...

I see the list of bug fixes and see great promise. It is likely that most bugs affected more than one particular program. Assuming the bug fixes themselves aren't introducing too much new code (which will inevitably contain bugs itself), I see Wine as stabilizing, not losing the battle.

Roger that. I use Ubuntu for all my dev work and for media manipulation work...If only these efforts would be dispensed on making the utility software on Linux user friendly. Have yet to find a screencast maker that just works :)

At this stage working on something like wine seems like a misguided effort. I use windows as my primary desktop OS and it works well. For non-windows users, a vm solution would be way better than a kluge like wine.

I use Ubuntu as my primary desktop OS and it works well -- and I can say that it does in part because when I get an occasional itch to play a game, wine works for me more often than not (most recently: Hearthstone).

If I still used Windows as my primary desktop OS, I wouldn't care about wine either, but then again I wouldn't be the target market, now would I?

You are right, I am not the target audience. The point is that the effort required to keep a project like Wine going could be better spent on doing other things that make the overall Linux experience much more appealing.

I used Ubuntu as my primary Desktop during the stone age of Vista and even then, using Wine was a painful experience compared to just switching to Windows.

VM or full Install, you need a license to do that. Not everyone is ready to pay just to use some incompatible tools.

I agree on the effort part though : it's a lot of time loss on something less and less useful nowadays.