CREATE
HOW TO DO ANYTHING ON YOUR MAC, iPHONE & iPAD
Run Windows apps on Mac
Integrate Windows games and programs into your Mac desktop with Wine
REQUIRES
Porting Kit (macOS 10.8 or later), SIP disabled (Catalina only)
YOU WILL LEARN
How to run 32–bit Windows apps on your Mac in Catalina
IT WILL TAKE
25 minutes
THERE ARE SEVERAL ways to run Windows–only apps on your Mac, but only one allows you to run them directly from your Mac desktop, and that’s Wine (winehq.org). Its command-line nature makes it fiddly, but thankfully more user–friendly variants exist.
Of these, CrossOver for Mac 19.0 (bit.ly/ cwwindonmac) is by far the best way to get Windows apps working on your Mac, but it’s not free: prices start from around $41. Luckily, there are several free alternatives; they’re not quite as user– friendly, but of these Porting Kit (portingkit.com) still manages to take a lot of hassle out of the process.
One fly in the ointment is that you’ll have to disable System Integrity Protection (SIP) to use it in macOS Catalina. This requirement is likely to be removed from later versions, but if that makes you too uncomfortable, you might prefer to stick with CrossOver instead. Porting Kit makes use of another Mac– friendly solution, Wineskin, to convert Windows apps into self–contained application “wrappers” that enable you to run them directly from the Applications folder as if they were native programs.