Sometimes developers feel they need to put the brakes on a project and endorse another.
Whisky, the open-source front-end interface for Wine that’s helped make Windows gaming on Mac more accessible, has been paused by its developer. The project’s 18-year-old creator, Isaac Marovitz, announced the shutdown and encouraged users to switch to the paid CrossOver app instead.
Explaining the decision, Marovitz expressed concern that Whisky was potentially harming the Wine ecosystem and its growth by competing with CodeWeavers’ CrossOver, which functions as a commercial project.
“Whisky, in my opinion, has not been a positive on the Wine community as a whole,” he wrote on the project’s website. He said that Whisky contributed “practically zero” to Wine development while potentially threatening CrossOver’s financial viability.
Marovitz is currently a full-time student attending Northeastern University, which also makes significant demands on his time. “I lost interest in the project,” he admitted. “And as I’m still a student and also not being paid for work on Whisky, it becomes hard to justify working on it if I no longer enjoy it.” He said that occasional updates to Whisky may still come if macOS “fundamentally breaks the main app,” which happened with macOS Sequoia 15.4.
From CodeWeavers’ end, company CEO James B. Ramey stated that he appreciated Marovitz’s work. “We ‘tip our cap’ to Isaac and the impact he made to macOS gaming,” Ramey wrote, acknowledging that Whisky, like CrossOver, was “a labor of love built by people who care deeply about giving users more choices.”
Throughout its run, Whisky gained popularity for its user-friendly interface that helped simplify running Windows games on macOS. The project also helped demonstrate the potential of Apple’s own Game Porting Toolkit, which is based on the same Wine technology that powered both Whisky and CrossOver.
Per Ars Technica, Marovitz stated that he isn’t done with development around Mac gaming, and that “Right now I’m working on the recompilation of Sonic Unleashed and bringing it fully to Mac.”
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.
Via MacRumors, CodeWeavers, docs.getwhisky.app, and Ars Technica