Whisky

» see getwhisky.app as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Whisky was a graphical wrapper for Wine, written in SwiftUI, aimed at Apple Silicon Macs running Sonoma or later. You made a bottle, dropped a Windows game into it, and it ran. No terminal and no hunting around for the right Wine build. It was free and open source, and it picked up roughly 15,000 stars on GitHub inside two years, which for a Mac utility is a great deal of attention.

What sat underneath is the part that matters later. Whisky was built on CrossOver 22.1.1 and on Apple's own Game Porting Toolkit. CrossOver is CodeWeavers' commercial product, the one people pay for, and CodeWeavers employs most of the engineers who keep Wine working on macOS at all. Whisky took that work, put a native Mac interface on it, and handed it out for nothing.

Mac gaming is not somewhere I have ever spent time. My machines have been Windows and Linux since I started choosing them myself, and the problem Whisky existed to solve, running a Windows binary on an ARM Mac through two translation layers, has never once come up in my week. I am reading this one off the repository and the notice.

~ the record ~

~ the argument he made ~

The maintenance notice is dated 9 April 2025 and it is unusually direct about motive. Marovitz leads with the plain reason: he had lost interest, and running the project was time-consuming work he was doing for free while a student. He does not dress that up or invent a better story for it.

The second reason is the one that got written about. He had concluded that Whisky was damaging Wine on the Mac rather than helping it. The logic runs that Whisky depends on CrossOver's work, CrossOver's revenue is what pays for Wine development on macOS, and a free front end that pulls users away from the paid product starves the thing it is standing on. His recommendation was that people go and buy CrossOver, and he took the trouble to explain the pricing, that it is a license rather than a subscription and that upgrades cost less than the first purchase.

Underneath both of those sat a drift problem. Once Apple shipped the Game Porting Toolkit, the original idea behind Whisky stopped being clearly the point, and the project had been wandering since.

~ the archive flag ~

Version 2.3.5 shipped on 5 April 2025. The notice went up four days later. The repository took commits for about another month, and then Marovitz set it to archived, which on GitHub is a one-way switch that makes a project read-only and prints a banner across the repository header saying so.

getwhisky.app is still serving in 2026, still titled "Whisky - Run Modern Windows Games on macOS," still describing the product in the present tense. The only thing on the site admitting that anything happened is the maintenance notice, one click away under the docs subdomain. The app also still works, mostly, which is the awkward part of this particular death. Nobody took a server down and there is no date on which it stopped running. There is only the date on which the person who understood it decided to stop.

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