CrossOver 16 adds Microsoft Office 2013 & 64-bit application virtualization

"... either though a software license, or through an Office 365 subscription ..."
I must be confused... if you have an Office 365 subscription and/or software license why would you go the kludgy reverse-engineered route to install something you can just install natively? I can see it for Visio or Project since MS doesn't make it available for the Mac. But Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook all exist natively on MacOS now either through Office 365 or enterprise volume license so why put another layer in between? And if "... Microsoft Project 2013, Visio 2013, and Outlook 2013 are not yet supported... " then I'm really lost as to why anyone would pay for this on Mac. On Linux... yeah, I could see it, but why on the Mac?

Also, the title of the article says "CrossOver 16 adds Microsoft Office 2013 & 64-bit application virtualization" what does this "virtualization" gain you over just using Fusion or Parallels and integrating the native Windows app into your menu bar and app tray? Don't get me wrong... I've been a Linux admin for years and embraced Crossover on Linux many years ago... I just don't see the point of it for Mac. Could someone please enlighten me?

Because Office 2013 for Mac and Windows aren't precisely the same.

Supp0rtLinux said:

Also, the title of the article says "CrossOver 16 adds Microsoft Office 2013 & 64-bit application virtualization" what does this "virtualization" gain you over just using Fusion or Parallels and integrating the native Windows app into your menu bar and app tray? Don't get me wrong... I've been a Linux admin for years and embraced Crossover on Linux many years ago... I just don't see the point of it for Mac. Could someone please enlighten me?

Crossover has dramatically less overhead than running a whole other operating system in a full virtual machine. People complain that the new MacBook Pro "isn't a Pro machine" because it's limited to 16 GB of RAM. This kind of thing lets you reduce your RAM consumption because you don't need to run all of Windows to get at your application.

The same fundamental drive is behind the Docker craze, which is driving some truly unfortunate development in the Linux world such as systemd. An OS consumes X disk space and Y RAM just to start. If you have 50 VMs on a host, guess what: you burn 50X and 50Y. There are technologies to reduce this like linked clones and RAM deduplication, but they are limited by the hypervisor not necessarily knowing what you're doing in the guest. Multiple "containers" all running on one host OS only need to burn the drive space and RAM to run the host instance of the OS. Ideally, each container should believe itself to have exclusive access to the full disk, the full RAM space, and so forth, but that access will actually be arbitrated. Right now, containers on Linux are a bit of a mess, and most "container hypervisors" actually spin up a separate full VM per container. Or they run all the containers on the same OS with no real separation such that one can interfere with another.

FreeBSD jails (which provide the origin of the term "jailbreak" on iOS devices) and Solaris zones are significantly more capable than any Linux containerization system I've seen. In fact, Solaris zones can be "branded", which lets them do syscall translation. This lets you run Solaris 8 software unmodified on Solaris 10 by responding to syscalls from inside the branded zone as if the kernel were Solaris 8. One of the brands available is "LX", which does Linux syscall translation to run a lot of Linux software in zones. Check out SmartOS some time.

Bringing it back around, syscall translation is fundamentally how Wine operates. Over time, the developers add more calls they handle and they improve their handling of edge cases of existing calls. It's very neat technology, and I'm happy to support it. Now that Samsung owns Joyent, I'd love to see them invest significantly in Wine and make "Win32" branded zones for SmartOS! Might be a little harder than LX-branded zones, but I bet it's doable. ;)

I used to use CrossOver before when I had to use IE for one specific purpose. I had no issues.

zimmie said:

Supp0rtLinux said:

Also, the title of the article says "CrossOver 16 adds Microsoft Office 2013 & 64-bit application virtualization" what does this "virtualization" gain you over just using Fusion or Parallels and integrating the native Windows app into your menu bar and app tray? Don't get me wrong... I've been a Linux admin for years and embraced Crossover on Linux many years ago... I just don't see the point of it for Mac. Could someone please enlighten me?

Crossover has dramatically less overhead than running a whole other operating system in a full virtual machine. People complain that the new MacBook Pro "isn't a Pro machine" because it's limited to 16 GB of RAM. This kind of thing lets you reduce your RAM consumption because you don't need to run all of Windows to get at your application.

The same fundamental drive is behind the Docker craze, which is driving some truly unfortunate development in the Linux world such as systemd. An OS consumes X disk space and Y RAM just to start. If you have 50 VMs on a host, guess what: you burn 50X and 50Y. There are technologies to reduce this like linked clones and RAM deduplication, but they are limited by the hypervisor not necessarily knowing what you're doing in the guest. Multiple "containers" all running on one host OS only need to burn the drive space and RAM to run the host instance of the OS. Ideally, each container should believe itself to have exclusive access to the full disk, the full RAM space, and so forth, but that access will actually be arbitrated. Right now, containers on Linux are a bit of a mess, and most "container hypervisors" actually spin up a separate full VM per container. Or they run all the containers on the same OS with no real separation such that one can interfere with another.

FreeBSD jails (which provide the origin of the term "jailbreak" on iOS devices) and Solaris zones are significantly more capable than any Linux containerization system I've seen. In fact, Solaris zones can be "branded", which lets them do syscall translation. This lets you run Solaris 8 software unmodified on Solaris 10 by responding to syscalls from inside the branded zone as if the kernel were Solaris 8. One of the brands available is "LX", which does Linux syscall translation to run a lot of Linux software in zones. Check out SmartOS some time.

Bringing it back around, syscall translation is fundamentally how Wine operates. Over time, the developers add more calls they handle and they improve their handling of edge cases of existing calls. It's very neat technology, and I'm happy to support it. Now that Samsung owns Joyent, I'd love to see them invest significantly in Wine and make "Win32" branded zones for SmartOS! Might be a little harder than LX-branded zones, but I bet it's doable. ;)

Know what takes even less space?  Running the applications natively.  That was the OP's point.