Wine worth paying for

CrossOver is a commercial version of Wine provided by CodeWeavers, available for macOS and Linux. There’s also a beta version available for ChromeOS (for Intel Chromebooks only), which uses the Android subsystem. It has its own installer for Windows applications, replete with all the tweaks and DLL substitutions necessary to run them smoothly. Thanks to some proprietary additions CrossOver boasts the ability to run things that standard Wine cannot, most notably Office

2016, but many games too. Besides this, CodeWeavers also perform extensive testing of popular applications on CrossOver, to ensure new software works and that new CrossOver releases don’t introduce regressions. And they provide technical support too. Proceeds from CrossOver contribute to

Wine development, and they pay many of the Wine developers’ salaries. CodeWeavers also provide the infrastructure for winehq.org. So they’re pretty much the opposite of so many other companies that profit from FLOSS products without giving anything back. This is one of those times where we don’t mind proprietary software. You can download a fully featured 14-day free trial, and CrossOver

Linux prices start at £32 (for a single version). CodeWeavers does recommend testing your programs thoroughly in the trial version before you stump up any cash. It’s a good product, but it’s not perfect.