[kinkora]

preface - I am directing my displeasure at Apple, not the fantastic team at wine for creating this as an open source project.

I love wine and it runs fantastically well on both my personal mac and on my fedora workstation. I run a lot of old school engineering apps (think like MIPS simulators) that doesn't run on any other platform so wine makes it easy for me to both be productive at work since I am much more efficient on a command line and allows me to WFH occasionally so that I can spend time with my family.

Now my rant - since upgrading to Catalina last week, I've been completely unable to run wine at any way shape and form due to Apple's mandate that all 32bit programs be barred from running on Catalina. Guess what runs exclusively on 32 bit?

I tried everything including compiling my own wine64 wrapper but it doesn't work at all since the underlying app is still win32. I know there is a crossover product that works but unfortunately that's not on the cards due to budget issues.

Honest question: why is it so hard to get wine32 working on Catalina and why doesn't Catalina have an option to run 32bit apps? Its been out since October 2019 so one will have thought a solution will have surfaced.

[rsfinn]

Crossover 19, released in December 2019, supports running 32-bit applications under Catalina. There was a lot of emphasis on how they would not release version 19 until this difficult problem was solved. For a discussion of why this was so hard, see, e.g., https://www.codeweavers.com/about/blogs/jwhite/2019/12/10/ce....

I'm not sure what process is followed in migrating this capability back to the open source code base, but (as a professional software developer) I would suggest maybe this would be the time to throw $40 their way to support them?

[dmitrygr]

as crossover is based on wine, why not ask them for the source?

[rgovostes]

The last released Macs that were not 64-bit use Intel Core Solo or Intel Core Duo processors, and those haven't been able to upgrade past Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, released over a decade ago in 2009. According to Apple's definitions of "vintage" and "obsolete", this puts these Macs well into the "obsolete" category.

The upside to removing 32-bit is shrinking the size of the system, removing complexity, shrinking the testing matrix when modifying system frameworks, etc.

The writing has been on the wall for 32-bit apps for a long time, including warning users when launching a 32-bit app that it would cease working, and showing users a list of incompatible software when upgrading to Catalina. App developers were incentivized to release updates to their apps (using 64-bit toolchains that have been available since 2007 and before), and users were given warnings about upgrading if they need 32-bit compatibility.

Meanwhile, over the past decade there has been significant improvement in virtualization technologies, which allow you to run 32-bit operating systems with great performance. You can run Windows XP in a VM or WINE in a Docker container (which runs inside a Linux VM on macOS).

[fredsanford]

If only we could have had this conversation for all the software we use over a lifetime and get used to or very productive with...

<< Hello, Mr/Ms Shoestring Budget software developer in 2003... Could you write your (MIPS simulator, CAD app, VLSI Design System) in 64 bit code so when Goobuntu, Crapple and Microslop remove support for 32 bit apps I'll still be able to use your software? Pretty please? >>

[tinus_hn]

A conversation requires not just a request but also a response. Here it is:

<< No thanks, we’re not interested in investing effort in making sure you can use our software on operating systems newly released 17 years from now. Please fund our efforts by purchasing a new version once every 10 years. >>

[fredsanford]

That doesn't help if the company went out of business in the meantime.

[tinus_hn]

What does it matter? Companies don’t build software to last forever and they especially do not care about what happens after they go out of business.

Things don’t last forever. Software vendors won’t support everything forever. Middleware and operating system vendors won’t keep the albatross of supporting old things around forever.

If you want, you can keep running an old version of Mac OS X as long as you want. Just don’t expect Apple to support it.