Wine vs Winex vs Crossover vs Lindows, etc.

[Louie1961a]

OK, I need some advice. I want to run Linux exclusively. To do that, I need to run a few apps which are still only available on MS. I am currently dual booting
but want to get off of that. My basic needs for MS products are limited to Office 2000, quickbooks, turbotax, and the odd game or two (Civ 3
comes to mind). I am not interested in finding open source equivalents for these apps for various reasons. So I am thinking of using Wine, or Winex,
or the Crossover plug-in, or something like that. I am more interested in tool that is "wine-like" which will let me run these without a windows
license/copy of windows installed. So, VMware, win4lin, etc. are out of the question.

So, here is my real question: Can I do everything I want to do, with just one of these? If so, which one is best? Or do I need to get Cross over for
my office and quickbooks and Winex for my games? Or some other setup?

What's the real deal with these...they all seem to do essentially the same thing, but with little twists (i.e., Wines supports DX8 but wine and
Crossover may not??)

 

[TonyRic]

Crossover Office will run Word, Excel and Powerpoint just fine. IE with some problems and Outlook with some documented issues/workarounds.

As for Quicken/Quickbooks, I am not sure.

There have been alot of reported success with WineX, although I am not a gamer.

What I can say is this. I have moved Quicken exclusively to my Wifes laptop and have not since, had the need to run VMware on my laptop. Almost time to free up that 4GB being used by VMware and relegate VMware to testing new distributions.

As for Lindows, it is still pretty much vaporware. The sneak previews have not included a REAL working wine implementation yet.

Also, the Crossover plugin product (separate from Crossover Office) is absolutely SCHWEET.

 

[EHobaX]

I haven't tried any of the Crossover wines, but I have used WineX. I don't believe Civ 3 is working correctly ATM. I would check the list of games on their website to be sure if the ones you want to play are running. Check the posts as well. Even though the game may be at a working level of 1, it may still run. I don't think they update the values too much. I got Madden 2k2 working fine (besides the sound), and they still list it as 1.

 

[Phokus]

Is it possible to run winex under freebsd, or is there a freebsd alternative?