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Use Wine for gaming on Linux? Try out Bottles

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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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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly.
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pleasereadthemanual Dec 15, 2021
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.
I never thought I'd hear "pirating software on GNU/Linux is too hard" as a reason not to use the system. I guess I really have heard it all, now.


Last edited by pleasereadthemanual on 15 December 2021 at 3:03 am UTC
Marlock Dec 15, 2021
SDL did eventually write the wrapper
https://github.com/libsdl-org/sdl12-compat

X-Wayland is trying to smooth out the rough edges for X.org apps running over Wayland

Pipewire is already working as a drop-in replacement for PulseAudio, ALSA and Jack (WIP, has a few limitations but awesome progress)

I know some libs in some abstraction levels are worse than others, but it's not all doom and gloom and linux / opensource in general does have a very active comunity working on shims for pretty much anything you can think of.

Not to mention old windows software is often better via wine or than on windows itself, so there is that...
Swamper Dec 15, 2021
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.

Are we still there.. With all the free games and software available?
Comandante Ñoñardo Dec 15, 2021
I am testing it, and I wonder how to change the default location for the bottles...
Cybolic Dec 15, 2021
Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoI am testing it, and I wonder how to change the default location for the bottles...

Same here. I started by looking at the code and the only way I see is to symlink ~/.local/share/bottles/bottles.
mirkobrombin Dec 15, 2021
Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoI am testing it, and I wonder how to change the default location for the bottles...

We will support this in the future :)
Feydreva Dec 16, 2021
personnaly, I use QT4Wine to manage my prefixes and wine option.
i tried Bottles but find it confusing.
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