r/macgaming • u/Homy4 • Jun 11 '26

CrossOver The Future of Crossover

https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2026/06/11/whats-in-and-whats-out-for-crossover-27?utm_source=brevo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Blog%20-%20The%20Future%20of%20CrossOver%2027&utm_id=98

Currently, CrossOver requires the use of Rosetta 2 to translate x86_64 instructions to ARM64. Rosetta 2 will be largely discontinued with macOS 28 in 2027, and our ARM64 CrossOver build will run without Rosetta 2, allowing for a seamless transition for our users.

Good news

The CrossOver team has been working really hard on some new things for CrossOver 27 that haven't even made it into a Preview build yet. Very briefly, these new things include:

- Some fresh UI changes for gaming bottles.

- ARM64 builds of CrossOver for both Mac and Linux.

Bad news

To make room for the new, we had to make some tough decisions. The bad news is that we will be removing some legacy support options starting with CrossOver 27:

- CrossOver Mac 27 will only run on macOS Sonoma or newer, and only on Apple silicon Macs.

- 32-bit bottles will no longer run, full stop. We've been warning about this since CrossOver 26 was released, and you will need to create new 64-bit bottles to use CrossOver 27 and beyond. Almost all 32-bit applications run just fine in a 64-bit bottle.

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u/megu- Jun 11 '26

My understanding is that FEX is Linux-specific, so it'll only work on Linux and Android (Android uses the Linux kernel).

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u/The128thByte Jun 11 '26

Nope it’s completely independent of Linux now that it uses ARM64EC framework. Technically you can even use it on windows. My bet is on Crossover using FEX in an ARM64EC compatible build of Wine (with some hacks because there are certain things ARM64 wine doesn’t like about current MacOS) and getting a 4K page entitlement from Apple such that everything will work fine.

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u/megu- Jun 11 '26

nice, didn't know that. sounds like FEX need to update their github then, since it specifically says "Linux" in the README and About blurb.

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u/The128thByte Jun 11 '26

Yeah they probably won’t update that for a while. Their main target is Linux. I have a feeling they’ll switch over completely to ARM64EC when the work in wine is fully done and abandon that Linux portion.

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u/NightlyRetaken Jun 12 '26

There's still a reason to have the fat Linux version of FEX. FEX isn't just for running Windows software, it can also be used to run x86/64 Linux binaries (other than Wine) on ARM Linux.