If you aren’t running Windows, you’ve probably heard of WINE, and may have heard of Crossover. WINE (Wine Is Not An Emulator) is a way to run Windows programs on non-windows systems without creating a whole virtual machine. Crossover is a paid bit of software created by Codeweavers which streamlines a lot of the process for you.
I have been a paid user of Crossover for several years now, largely because Codeweavers is the major corporate sponsor behind WINE and some ease of use issues.
However, with the latest version, I noticed some significant slowdowns while running on my Debian Bookworm system. Turns out that – of course – the problem existed between chair and keyboard, but the cause was not immediately apparent.
The issue is because I don’t like client-side decorations, so I have the gtk3-nocsd package installed from official repositories. Since it was from the official repos, it should work out of the box, right?
I discovered the problem when I ran Crossover from the commandline. I kept getting errors that Crossover could not preload libgtk3-nocsd.so.0. That error persisted even after I reinstalled the gtk3-nocsd package.
And then it hit me. Crossover (and WINE) need i386 versions of many packages.
The packages installed by Debian were just the amd64 versions. Crossover (and WINE) were looking for the i386 version.
The whole problem was resolved with two commands on Debian (though you may only need the first one):
sudo apt install libgtk3-nocsd0:amd64 libgtk3-nocsd0:i386 gtk3-nocsd
sudo apt reinstall libgtk3-nocsd0:amd64 libgtk3-nocsd0:i386 gtk3-nocsdNote: The specifics of how to install the i386 version of the gtk3-nocsd package will vary depending on your distribution. This worked on Debian Bookworm (the current "testing" release), but obviously anything using RPM or AUR is going to be different.
Since then, Crossover has returned to its normal speed, and while I’m still adjusting to the user interface changes, I’m quite happy with it again.
Featured Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay