CodeWeavers VS Wine

[hellnoire]

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm going to say this first: I was using Codeweaver's most up to date version off the site, and the most up to date DEB of Wine. At time of writing, that would be 1.1.38 for Wine, and 8.0.3-1 for Codeweavers. And while I am trying Wine, I am not using any third party add-ons, such as WineDoors or PlayOnLinux, both of which I will be trying out at a later date. The test system is a 3.01 Ghz Intel CPU, 3 Gigs of DDR1 RAM, an ATI 2400 HD, and a 5600 rpm 160 Gig hard drive. This is my desktop box at home, and while it will be updated sometime, it's what I've got to test with. The operating system that's running the test will be Ubuntu Linux 9.10, fully updated and with my third-party ATI driver installed.

The applications that are going to be tried are Steam, to run SiN Emergence, Q10 Text Editor, .kkrieger, Total Commander, and WinRAR. As it stands at time of testing, SiN and Steam should run decently, however, since they both rely on DirectX and IE to be installed, the true test will to see how well they enable the features. .kkrieger should be flawless (at least according to WineDB), and Q10 and Total Commander should give me some trouble. WinRAR was chosen because I figured it's worth a shot to run it under Linux and might not run. (Even though we have RAR and UNRAR by default ) I deliberately chose applications that I could get very easily and could install without too much hassle, and without having to resort to cracks. And while all of them have alternatives under Linux, this is a test of Wine and Codeweavers. So let's start...

Round One: Install

Wine, by default, is included in nearly ever Linux repository out there, though for the most part, it's completely out of date. Bringing it up to date is usually as simple as adding the repository that it uses. However, when I did this, (and normally, I admit, it's not the case) I got a NO_PUBKEY error when trying to update my sources. To a lot of newbies, that would turn them off right there. To me, it just means I need to fix that. While there are easier ways of installing it, one of the major ones being a DEB linked off the site, to many, they would follow the instructions written on the site and once seeing it broken, declare it as useless. Because I'm writing this from the point of view of a newbie,when it comes to installing it, it's not very friendly.

On the flip side, Crossover provides you with a SH or DEB file that you can simply install the same way you would an EXE under Windows. This deb automatically installs the proper repository to update it and handles the rest on it's own. To me, Codeweavers won this round hands down.

Wine: 0
Codeweavers: 1

Round Two: Compatibility

This is the easiest part: either the app works or it doesn't.

Q10:
Wine: Installed, and ran perfectly.
Codeweavers: Installed, but wouldn't run.
Codeweavers suffered the same error of Runtime Error 255 at 00000043. I hate to say this, but I had a feeling this would be the outcome, especially because I used to use the application all the time to write. These days, it's PyRoom I use. I am surprised that it works under Wine again though!

.kkrieger:
Wine: Worked perfectly, got a steady 40-70 frames a second.
CodeWeavers: Wouldn't run. It would try, but it would throw up a fatal error, freezing the system. A simple force kill did kill it though.
A bit of background info: .kkrieger was designed by a warez group to be a scene demo, however, they decided to make a demo game instead. It might be less then a megabyte, but it is a very labour intensive game, at least on my systems! So it's a bit of a surprise to see Wine able to run it fine! And at a half decent framerate too!

Total Commander:
Wine: Worked flawlessly. Actually looks somewhat like it belongs too!
CodeWeavers: Installed fine, works fine. If anything, it looks out of place, but it works perfectly from my testing.
Total Commander surprised me by working out of the box. One of my buddies recommended I use it because he never had luck with it. However, the reason you'd use under Linux is limited... there are plenty of * Commander apps in your repos!

WinRAR:
Wine: The license agreement must have been written by Gnomes or something... But it installs fine and runs fine, for the most part. It does throw up an error but it doesn't cause a failure of the program.
CodeWeavers: Worked flawlessly, no errors. As with Total Commander, it looked out of place, but everything worked.
Another surprising one to work. WinRAR, like Total Commander, has replacements out of the repos, so there's no point to using it.

Steam/SiN Emergence:
Wine: Steam installed and works beautifully, SiN suffers from random glitches that while not making it unplayable, did make for an interesting laugh from yours truely.
CodeWeavers: Steam and SiN both installed fine, Steam had to have some very light tweaking done to make it work extremely well (disabling the windows manager effects) but otherwise loaded fine right out of the box. SiN loaded and played fine, however, I did have to set the graphics settings down.
Some important information: While I was able to play SiN fine under CodeWeavers, I did need to manually set my graphic setup. I had to drop everything to Medium to play on 40 frames a minute, and had I dropped to low, I would have gotten 60. It's not a major gripe, but the fact remains that under Windows, I'm able to run my games at 60 frames a minute with Medium, the fact remains.... Linux isn't for gaming.

Overall, CodeWeavers was able to run three of the five test applications and able to run them very smoothly. The major thing that it has going for it, however, is the fact it does have a dedicated system for gamers. While that's a nice feature, sadly, I can't demo the feature as I didn't notice a link for downloading it. The major thing I did notice, that I did like is that Codeweavers took over the extentions for EXE automatically. Yes, this is nitpicking, but if you're running an EXE under Linux, I don't think you're trying to extract it.

Wine, on the other hand, managed to run everything I threw at it, and perfectly too. I've used Wine in the past, and had the repo installed, but to have just the locally installed DEB's enough to make it work. For an application still under development, it certainly hit a home run with all five applications tested. It does not have the same settings by default of allowing you to run EXEs on a single click. Nitpicky, but just an odd point.

This is not to say that at a later point, these will not work, but Wine and CodeWeavers do have "regressions" as they call them.

Wine: 1
CodeWeavers: 1

Round Three: General Ease of Use

This is the deciding round.

Codeweavers has a lot of tweaks and flare that makes it easier to understand what you are doing, hopefully, built into the program to make it an all-in-one solution. However, this doesn't mean that everything works out of the box. It has an installer specially formulated for Debian and Ubuntu based distributions, Fedora and Red Hat based distributions, and a generalized script file for those that do not use Red Hat/Fedora or Debian/Ubuntu. This makes it easily adaptable for those that want something quick and easy to install, however, it does not ensure compatibility, especially because it's an old version of Wine that you are running.

Meanwhile, Wine has a lot of tweaks and flare, much like CodeWeavers, however, they come in the form of WineDoors and PlayOnLinux, and other third party tools. It has been compiled many times over for several different operating systems and isn't limited by just the deb/rpm/sh of Codeweavers. While you do not have a perfect solution with Wine, you also don't have one in Codeweavers. And essentially, what you are paying for is to use Wine.

If I had to choose between Codeweavers and Wine, I'd easily go with Wine because of the general fact that it is free of cost, and free of code, meaning I could modify it if I so chose to run my applications. Codeweavers has no major advantage, however, according to the site, part of the money you spend to buy it is to get documentation and help, along side supporting the Wine Project. However, to me, this isn't justified well enough to buy it... so I'm sticking to free Wine.

Final Score
Wine: 2
Codeweavers: 1

[kavinraja]

Thanks for the review Hellnoire.
I have been thinking about buying codeweaver since the trial period of it is going to expire in about a weak.
Now i think its best for me to switch to wine rather spending money.

Nice review Pal.

[hellnoire]

Not a problem.

Overall, it's an interesting sell, I find. It takes Wine, and adds the functionality of WineDoors/Plays On Linux and bundles it all into one application. So if you need or want an all in one solution, then go for it.

But my thoughts are it's not worth it. As a tweaker, and a Linux die hard since '07, I suppose that's why I prefer Wine over Codeweavers.

If Codeweavers works for you, stick with them, they seem to suggest they have less in the way of regressions. But as it's based on Wine, you'd be better suited to be using the original and using one of the third party tools I named. They both do an amazing job, I find.

[ginzon]

Good Review hellnoire....

I Don't use any of it though, want to use anything related to Windows I just reboot into XP...LOL!!

[hellnoire]

Then you'll have flawless emulation ginzon

[ginzon]

HA...Nice said...

[Alboguy]

Yeah I think Wine is better and simple to use.