Hi. This has always bugged me a little. I've tried using wine before. I always get excited when i see the installer come up and it looks like it is working - then it crashes and i get a load of messages in the terminal. I've used the demo of crossover office and it works great. I haven't used it but im sure Transgaming's software works well. To my understanding both projects use wine. Why is it that wine on itself seems to be so inferor? I know this is a pretty hard question to answer but would be glad to hear from someone who has more insight then I. thanks for any replies in advance.

Cedega and crossover office use wine but also add other things. Cedega has extensive directX libraries, and crossover office has many optimizations for microsoft office.

The reason wine in itself is so weak is that it quite simply takes a lot of work to get a windows API compatible with Linux. Quite a bit must be done with reverse engineering, which is time consuming. Adding directx libraries requires a massive effort in itself, as transgaming has recognized.

Also keep in mind that wine will always be one step behind windows, as they add newer parts to the api. I often find that older programs (starcraft) will work well under wine alone but newer ones (Half Life 2) will barely work at all. The solution is just to pretty much wait or go to cedega (but even that will take a bit of time before they have the api updated).

I wouldn't consider Wine "weak" at all, it just depends what you are trying to do. Try to think of Cedega and Crossover Office as your Windows XP, whereas normal Wine would be Windows 98 or 2000. I have successfully gotten tons of simple programs and games working with normal Wine, plus I don't have to deal with costs or licenses. For example, I got Diablo 2 (and expansion) going, classics like Space Empires 4, simple programs like Foxit PDF and Bejewelled Deluxe. I guess it depends on your needs, but if you install Wine thinking it'll handle Half Life 2 you will be disappointed. But don't be hard on Wine, as the above poster said it's really hard to handle all those undocumented WinAPIs.