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Switching from Whisky

Whisky was the free Mac Wine app almost everyone used, and it was good: 39 releases in two years and over a million downloads. Its site now says it is no longer maintained and that you should buy CrossOver instead.

The deprecated Homebrew cask still does about 31,400 installs a year, so people are still finding out the hard way. This page is for them.

What happened

The last release was v2.3.5 on 5 April 2025, fixing a crash macOS 15.4 introduced. The maintenance notice landed on 9 April and the repository was archived a month later.

Isaac Marovitz gave two reasons. He was an unpaid student carrying the support load for a user base in the hundreds of thousands. And he had concluded that Whisky was bad for Wine on the Mac: macOS support is kept alive largely by CodeWeavers, funded by CrossOver sales, and Whisky was a free wrapper built from CrossOver's own sources. In his words, "The revenue from CrossOver is what keeps Wine on Mac alive… TLDR; Whisky harms Wine on Mac." He also said plainly that CodeWeavers had not paid him to say it. It is an argument made in good faith and worth reading in full.

Why it stopped keeping up

Whisky bundled its own engine built from CrossOver 22.1.1 sources. That is Wine 7.7, from 2022, and the version was hardcoded in the app. The notice was explicit: no upgrade to Wine 8 or later, ever. The Steam breakage that followed was declared won't-fix, because there was no way to fix it inside a frozen engine.

The rest was solid work: D3DMetal by default, a per-bottle DXVK toggle, deep bottle settings with escape hatches to regedit and winecfg, a QuickLook extension giving Windows executables real Finder icons. Highball has not matched all of that polish. What Whisky never had was launcher automation, and its game knowledge lived in 254 wiki pages and a Discord rather than the app.

Where things stand now

Highball is notarized and auto-updating, with no account and no telemetry. Its database is open: 101 curated games, 5 of them verified by hand on real hardware, 39 blocked by kernel anti-cheat, and 12,491 predictions derived from ProtonDB. CC0 for the curated data, ODbL for predictions, MIT for anti-cheat. How it is built.

One thing the database cannot do yet: tell you which renderer to pick. Highball switches DXVK, DXMT and D3DMetal per bottle, but the number of games carrying two dated renderer verdicts is currently zero. It is a knob you turn, not a recommendation.

Moving your games across

Whisky bottles do not import into Highball, and no converter is planned. A Whisky bottle was built by a 2022 Wine and carries that engine's registry state and installed runtimes; pointing a Wine 10 engine at it inherits failures nobody can debug. Reinstall into a fresh bottle instead.

That means bandwidth, not surgery:

• Keep Whisky installed until you are done; installing Highball does not touch it.
• Get your saves out first. Whisky's bottle view has an Open C: Drive button; saves usually sit under users/, in Documents or AppData.
• Check your games in the database before you redownload 80 GB. If a title is blocked by kernel anti-cheat, no wrapper on any Mac will run it. Why that limit exists.
• Install Highball, make a bottle, and install Steam with one click. Epic connects in-app through the open-source Legendary client. Battle.net has a recipe.
• Reinstall, restore saves, then delete the old bottles. They are often tens of gigabytes.

If a game misbehaves after the move, start here.

The funding argument, since it will come up

Highball is not a repackaged CrossOver: its engines are assembled from pinned community Wine builds in the Gcenx and Sikarugir lineage. That does not make the point wrong. Someone has to pay for Wine on macOS, and today CodeWeavers largely does. Who builds what Highball depends on.

The community fork is a real option

Adam Franke's frankea/Whisky picked the project up in January 2026 and has kept it moving: around 465 stars, releases every couple of weeks, signed and notarized, GPL-3, no affiliate deals. If you liked Whisky you will lose nothing switching to it, and in several places it is ahead of Highball:

• Newer engine. Wine 11.0 stable with a Wine 11.15 beta track, against Highball's Wine 10 line.
• Deeper diagnostics. A crash classifier, remediation cards that apply a fix and report whether it worked, troubleshooting wizards. Highball has no equivalent, and it is the best answer anyone has built for the "my game just died" moment.
• More languages. 22 localizations via Crowdin.
• D3DMetal depth. MetalFX and DLSS bridging, Metal 4 encoding, fixes targeted at specific titles.

What differs: it needs macOS 15, D3DMetal means importing Apple's Game Porting Toolkit image yourself, its compatibility data is 83 hand-written entries, and there is no launcher automation beyond reading a Steam library you already installed. It keeps Whisky's bottle-first layout, though a library-first UI is merged and due in the next release.

Which should you use

Use the frankea fork if you want the app you already know with a newer engine underneath, if you are chasing D3DMetal or MetalFX performance on one specific title, or if you value that diagnostics stack. It is good work by someone doing it for the right reasons.

Use CrossOver if you would rather pay someone and have support to email. That is Whisky's own recommendation and it is not wrong. Longer comparison here.

Use Highball if you want your games rather than your bottles on the first screen, one-click Steam and Epic instead of chasing installers, and a verdict before you spend an evening downloading. Do not use it on an Intel Mac or macOS 13, if your game is one of the 39 blocked by kernel anti-cheat, or if it has a native Mac build, which beats translation every time. Highball is also new: the fork has roughly twenty times its installed base and months more of bug reports behind it.

Download Highball.dmg

Apple Silicon, macOS 14 or newer. Free, no account, no telemetry.