I just made a new discovery that makes me even happier that I bought Crossover Linux. I just installed a new distro to try out (Pop!_OS), and I wanted to use it to work on MS Word documents that are viewed and co-written with collaborators. I have a "bottle" (the term Crossover uses for a c: drive it creates for a set of applications) for MS Office 2010 in Ubuntu. It has been registered, and I want to be able to use it on my Pop!_OS installation on the same computer. Turns out that Crossover has a procedure for just that. You can create a .deb, .rpm or Solaris package from any bottle and transfer it over to the partition holding the new distro. I tried this. It took about 10 minutes to create the .deb file, and when I then installed it from Pop!_OS, it not only duplicated the c: drive with Office 2010 in it, but I was able to choose the apps in it as favourites and put them on my Gnome dock, from where they start right up. Checking the status, they remain registered in the new location. This not only saves time from reinstallation, but it also remembers my settings and keeps the apps registered. Perhaps there is a way to do all these things in pure Wine; I don't know. But this was easy and useful, and also with the other niceties of Crossover Linux, it makes it well worth the ~ $30 US I paid for it. Incidentally, that fee allows you use on any computer you own without having to buy additional copies.
Nice! How big was the bottle, out of curiosity?
The bottle is 1.3 gb; the whole folder for Crossover is 3.9 gb.
So am I to understand that each application (or in this case, entire suite) has its own bottle?
You can put whatever software you want in a bottle. What a bottle has is a certain configuration; e.g. to emulate Windows 7, xp or 10, certain other windows elements installed, etc. But I can put another program in my Office 2010 bottle if I want to.