Bottles isn't exactly a new Linux application but it's one I had only heard about recently. It's been advancing a lot in the last year and it's really looking great. Unlike other manager applications including Lutris, GameHub and so on it has a singular purpose — Bottles is designed to give you the best possible experience when managing the Windows compatibility layer Wine.
It includes a lot of options to allow you to easily tweak your installs with a few clicks of a button, which is exactly what I love about it. There's a few "runners" included which are various versions of Wine like their own Vaniglia, that has a few wine-staging patches and a newer updated theme and Lutris' Wine.
Everything is run inside Bottles, contained areas that keeps all your installs separated. A form of sandboxing from the rest of your system, and if you go with the Flatpak package you get this in full. A benefit of all this, is that each Bottle can have multiple restore points. So if you messed with it and it broke your Windows game, you can send it back to a previous point when it worked.
Much like the Winetricks app, Bottles also includes its own dependency manager allowing you to install extras into your environments. Some games and applications will only work with these extras, so to see it all included together - again with only a few button clicks is wonderful.
Bottles might have one of the smoothest and best looking ways to install and manage games / applications with Wine on Linux. Give it a try.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The comments on this article are closed.
Maybe just my mind playing tricks on me, but didn't wine prefixes used to be called bottles?
3 Likes, Who?
Quoting: GuppyMaybe just my mind playing tricks on me, but didn't wine prefixes used to be called bottles?As for Wine itself "prefix" was more popular. As fro CrossOver they indeed called it bottles.
9 Likes, Who?
Some recent post said that Linux needs to be pre-installed more to hit mainstream. This is somewhat naive to say specialy if you think Linux have high quality distributions for desktop use today. Unfortunately the desktop is almost dead. The new generation don't use computers but cellphone instead of it.
But let's assume Desktop will prevail and Linux have a chance to dominate over windows. Then Linux need to improve in these topics:
- GUI. It needs GUI for everything and I mean EVERYTHING!. (like this software solves a problem that wine itself don't). There are no users interested in using the terminal in the mainstream.
- The system cannot allow the user to break it easily (Linus effect)
- Latency and Inputlag must be ridiculously low and Desktop Environ and the kernel needs to handle that by default.
- BT needs to be rewriten... seriously...
- It needs Adobe (don't think will happen in the nier future)
- It needs Games (on going by now)
- It needs HDR and above 8 bit collors...
- It needs to keep backward compatibylity! Linux cannot break software because you update a lib that dropped legacy support.
Also, none of that needs to offer a windows like experience. Making a system easy and simple is very hard but also very necessary!
But let's assume Desktop will prevail and Linux have a chance to dominate over windows. Then Linux need to improve in these topics:
- GUI. It needs GUI for everything and I mean EVERYTHING!. (like this software solves a problem that wine itself don't). There are no users interested in using the terminal in the mainstream.
- The system cannot allow the user to break it easily (Linus effect)
- Latency and Inputlag must be ridiculously low and Desktop Environ and the kernel needs to handle that by default.
- BT needs to be rewriten... seriously...
- It needs Adobe (don't think will happen in the nier future)
- It needs Games (on going by now)
- It needs HDR and above 8 bit collors...
- It needs to keep backward compatibylity! Linux cannot break software because you update a lib that dropped legacy support.
Also, none of that needs to offer a windows like experience. Making a system easy and simple is very hard but also very necessary!
7 Likes, Who?
rustybroomhandle Dec 14, 2021
Bottles is great.
Lutris has better community support and installers that do special things like install GoG games with mods already applied, but the UI is like it was made by an army of drunk squirrels. It serves a different purpose than Bottles though, as the article says.
Anyway, +1 for managing wine with Bottles.
Lutris has better community support and installers that do special things like install GoG games with mods already applied, but the UI is like it was made by an army of drunk squirrels. It serves a different purpose than Bottles though, as the article says.
Anyway, +1 for managing wine with Bottles.
2 Likes, Who?
that remind me of a thing...
pirating games on linux is harder, some times you have to do a bunch of steps on windows to crack an game, and the tutorials simply dont translate well to an linux enviroment.
i mean, i remember when i was trying to instal palib on linux, i dont remember if it had an linux version that i couldnt install or what, but installing on windows was already hard enough (you had to setup an enviroment variable, first time that i saw this term on an windows context), now imagine if i tried to install the windows version on linux back then...
google it "how to setup an windows variable on windows on linux"
or better "how to setup an windows enviroment variable on wine"
its an issue to specific and google might return 0 results, or tons of results for windows but only a few for linux if you dig deep enough, or maybe no one has ever tried.
now multiply that for every game you try to pirate.
regardless of what you think about piracy, this is an major issue that we have to solve if we want linux to become popular, most gamers dont purchase everything, many test drive the pirated version to know if its worth purchasing.
pirating games on linux is harder, some times you have to do a bunch of steps on windows to crack an game, and the tutorials simply dont translate well to an linux enviroment.
i mean, i remember when i was trying to instal palib on linux, i dont remember if it had an linux version that i couldnt install or what, but installing on windows was already hard enough (you had to setup an enviroment variable, first time that i saw this term on an windows context), now imagine if i tried to install the windows version on linux back then...
google it "how to setup an windows variable on windows on linux"
or better "how to setup an windows enviroment variable on wine"
its an issue to specific and google might return 0 results, or tons of results for windows but only a few for linux if you dig deep enough, or maybe no one has ever tried.
now multiply that for every game you try to pirate.
regardless of what you think about piracy, this is an major issue that we have to solve if we want linux to become popular, most gamers dont purchase everything, many test drive the pirated version to know if its worth purchasing.
0 Likes
If anyone remembers Vineyard, this seems to be a good replacement for its ageing code.
Minor points where Bottles differs are:
I think Bottles is a great project and this list isn't meant to "call out" the project on anything, just a little note for anyone that happened to have used Vineyard and was wondering what the major differences are since the projects are very similar at a first quick glance.
Note: I'm the author of Vineyard.
Last edited by Cybolic on 14 December 2021 at 1:27 pm UTC
Minor points where Bottles differs are:
- Bottles/Prefixes are always created in ~/.local/share/bottles. Symlinking can solve that if you want and you can change the location afterwards from the GUI.
- Bottles doesn't use Winetricks but its own code. Not a pro or con, just something worth mentioning.
- Bottles uses its own builds of Wine (runners). This makes setup much easier, but less flexible if you prefer your own builds or want to configure an existing prefix.
- Bottles can import other prefixes, but it won't use the config of them (the wrapper.cfg format that winetricks, Vineyard, q4wine and wibom settled on almost a decade ago)
- Bottles has support for DXVK, FSR, DLSS, Esync/Fsync and other newer Wine technologies whereas Vineyard is stuck in the past :)
I think Bottles is a great project and this list isn't meant to "call out" the project on anything, just a little note for anyone that happened to have used Vineyard and was wondering what the major differences are since the projects are very similar at a first quick glance.
Note: I'm the author of Vineyard.
Last edited by Cybolic on 14 December 2021 at 1:27 pm UTC
11 Likes, Who?
I may have to look into this. But its success is largely dependent on having a bunch of useful pre-built wine versions available for easy install. This is what is most appealing about Lutris, with the added benefit of having the community install scripts available.
Well, then Windows is off the table.
Quoting: tamodolo- The system cannot allow the user to break it easily (Linus effect)
Well, then Windows is off the table.
3 Likes, Who?
Quoting: elmapulthat remind me of a thing...
pirating games on linux is harder, some times you have to do a bunch of steps on windows to crack an game, and the tutorials simply dont translate well to an linux enviroment.
i mean, i remember when i was trying to instal palib on linux, i dont remember if it had an linux version that i couldnt install or what, but installing on windows was already hard enough (you had to setup an enviroment variable, first time that i saw this term on an windows context), now imagine if i tried to install the windows version on linux back then...
google it "how to setup an windows variable on windows on linux"
or better "how to setup an windows enviroment variable on wine"
its an issue to specific and google might return 0 results, or tons of results for windows but only a few for linux if you dig deep enough, or maybe no one has ever tried.
now multiply that for every game you try to pirate.
regardless of what you think about piracy, this is an major issue that we have to solve if we want linux to become popular, most gamers dont purchase everything, many test drive the pirated version to know if its worth purchasing.
0 Likes
Quoting: tamodoloSome recent post said that Linux needs to be pre-installed more to hit mainstream. This is somewhat naive to say specialy if you think Linux have high quality distributions for desktop use today. Unfortunately the desktop is almost dead. The new generation don't use computers but cellphone instead of it.
But let's assume Desktop will prevail and Linux have a chance to dominate over windows. Then Linux need to improve in these topics:
- GUI. It needs GUI for everything and I mean EVERYTHING!. (like this software solves a problem that wine itself don't). There are no users interested in using the terminal in the mainstream.
- The system cannot allow the user to break it easily (Linus effect)
- Latency and Inputlag must be ridiculously low and Desktop Environ and the kernel needs to handle that by default.
- BT needs to be rewriten... seriously...
- It needs Adobe (don't think will happen in the nier future)
- It needs Games (on going by now)
- It needs HDR and above 8 bit collors...
- It needs to keep backward compatibylity! Linux cannot break software because you update a lib that dropped legacy support.
Also, none of that needs to offer a windows like experience. Making a system easy and simple is very hard but also very necessary!
Quote- GUI. It needs GUI for everything and I mean EVERYTHING!. (like this software solves a problem that wine itself don't). There are no users interested in using the terminal in the mainstream.
There should not be a GUI for everything. Even on Windows and Mac OS some things are only possible on the command line...
Quote- It needs Adobe (don't think will happen in the nier future)
The last thing Linux should do is copy other operating systems. Linux is great because of how unique it is.
Quote- It needs HDR and above 8 bit collors...
I do agree that it does lack in some technical areas and that should be fixed.
Quote- It needs to keep backward compatibylity! Linux cannot break software because you update a lib that dropped legacy support.
Windows keeps everything and Mac OS moves on all quickly from legacy code and Linux is somewhere in between. In my experience, I think that Mac OS does this the right way.
Quote- The system cannot allow the user to break it easily (Linus effect)
For every system I've used this can be done just in different ways. When I first started learning Windows I broke the whole system several times and same with Linux and Mac OS.
I do agree that apt should never have allowed a user the choice in the first place and rm -f was disallowed for the same reason.
Operating Systems are very complex and users will figure out a way to break them no matter how much effort you put into that.
1 Likes, Who?
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