Recently (within the past year) Codeweavers developers announced a new release of their product with which they present the new version of their important commercial software Crossover, which runs Windows programs on Linux. Crossover 18. It is now based on WINE 3.14 and supports, among other things, Outlook 2016.
For those readers who don't know CrossOver yet I can tell you that this is a commercial utility that allows you to run popular Windows applications on Unix systems (Linux or Mac) without the need for a Windows installation. It is a derivation of WINE with several patches added, and easier to use configuration tools.
Crossover is produced by CodeWeavers, which employs several WINE programmers and contributes code to the open source WINE project under GNU LGPL.
CodeWeavers sponsors the development of WINE and returns to the project all the innovations implemented for its commercial products.
I have to mention that this software, despite being based on Wine, is not free, so in order to use it you will have to pay for a license.
The company CodeWeavers announced the launch of the Crossover 18 bundle, based on Wine code and designed to run programs and games written for Windows.
The CodeWeavers team has updated Wine to version 3.14 which is the heart behind CrossOver that enables Windows software to run on macOS and Linux.
According to the company, the change makes "thousands of improvements" to CrossOver 18 over previous versions, just for its inclusion.
What's new in CrossOver 18
Between the bug fixes included in the version are found various, of which the one that stood out the most was a solution to a major problem that caused Office context menus to disappear from view.
While another resolved issue involved a file corrupted error in Office 2016 when installed via Internet Explorer. Bugs related to the Battle.net client have also been fixed.
While there are changes that help macOS users, most of the improvement in this version falls on Linux of the software.
From this new version of CrossOver we can highlight the following:
- The code base has been updated to Wine 3.14 (in the previous version of CrossOver 17.0, Wine 3.0 was used).
- Added support for Direct3D 12 implemented using the vkd3d package which provides translations of Vulkan API calls.
- It is now supported by the DXVK project, which implements direct support for Direct3D 10 and Direct3D 11, through call translation in the Vulkan API.
- DirectX 11 support has been significantly improved in this new version of CrossOver that works with the wined3d backend.
- It provided the ability to run some of the most popular games from the Blizzard company, such as World of Warcraft, Overwatch, and Diablo III.
- Initial support for Outlook 2016 and the ability to run Steam under this new version of CrossOver 18 with a simulated Windows 7 environment has been introduced.
The developers have fixed several bugs related to the Battle.net client. Office 2016 can now be reinstalled with Internet Explorer, without the "File Corrupted Error" occurring.
Finally, context menus in Office no longer disappear.
How to get Crossover 18.0?
To be able to obtain this utility in this new version only you can do it by paying a license which, if it has a price to be considered, in case you are not sure about it you can request a "Trial" license which gives you the possibility to test this tool for 14 days.
Another way to test CrossOver is by using Deepin OS which is a Debian-based Linux distribution that implements this tool within the system.
If you want to know more about the costs and how to obtain this tool, just go to to the following link.
Crossover 18 is currently available for users from 24,32 euros, all changes summarize the change log.