Isaac Marovitz, the developer of Whiskey, a frontend for Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit and Wine, has decided to throw in the towel. The developer is advising users to buy CrossOver instead, which provides the same service. The reasoning behind their decision seems sound, and are actually quite noble and considerate.
First and foremost, it’s the usual problem lone developers run into: they lost interest in the project, and to make matters worse, they’re only a student and simply lack the time to keep working on a project they’re simply not really into anymore. Running a complicated project like this on your own, unpaid, while also having to study is hard at the best of times, and if you’re also not interested in it anymore it quickly becomes a massive burden.
The second reason is that originally, Whiskey was just supposed to be a frontend for Wine on the Mac, without actually making any changes to Wine itself. The release of Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit changed the game, though, and all of a sudden Whiskey ended up shipping not just a nice frontend, but also custom versions of Wine. Marovitz states he doesn’t have the required knowledge and expertise to work on Wine, and as such, can’t contribute back to Wine and CrossOver, which feels bad.
By contrast, Whisky is based on CrossOver, but we don’t produce any bespoke fixes. I, quite frankly, do not have the requisite skills or time to do so. As a result, the amount that Whisky as a whole contributes to Wine is practically zero. This is not a fair trade, and continuing this parasitic relationship could easily harm CrossOver’s continued profitability and the existence of Wine on Mac as a whole.
↫ Isaac Marovitz
Wine, of course, has a ton of funding behind it these days, especially from Valve, but Valve’s interest lies solely and exclusively on Linux. While all of Valve’s funds and the work of Wine developers does benefit the Mac, much of the Wine on Mac work is done by CrossOver. I find it incredibly honest and respectful of Marovitz to make it clear he doesn’t want to leech off other people’s work without providing anything in return.
So, Whiskey is no more, but for the few Mac users who want to play Windows games on their Mac, CrossOver exists as a refuge that should work just fine.
To nitpick, neither Whiskey not Crossover are that good if you’re feeling retro. They tend to have regressions in support for older games.
An approach like PlayOnMac’s worked back in the day – install specific recommended wine versions for specific apps. Not sure if that’s maintained any more though and yes, it’s a major maintenance burden.
For anyone who finds it convenient to use WINE wrappers on macOS …. Kegworks by Dean M Greer (previously known as Wineskin) is still actively developed:
https://github.com/Kegworks-App/Kegworks
Currently, the wrapper has been updated to version 3.1.6 and the latest available engine is WS12WineCX24.07
Another project on to the code graveyard.
What is really a shame is that there wasn’t an entry point into existing projects that massively overlap for a clearly capable student.
Instead, he made a new project and fork of wine that nobody is likely to continue with.