Bottles is easily the most simple way to manage installing and running Windows games and apps on Linux outside of Steam. A new release is out now with plenty of useful tweaks.
Version 2022.8.14 adds in support of vmtouch, a way to cache certain things. The Bottles devs say it "lends us resources to diagnose and control cache" and that you can enable it to possibly improve performance. Another one is a new UI for managing the Vulkan post-processing layer vkBasalt, along with the ability to configure vkBasalt individually per Bottle which sounds great.
A new dark mode switcher is in. Originally it was removed, but it has been added back as not all distributions are updated to do it properly automatically so now you can switch it yourself to your liking.
Main Highlights:
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
- New vkBasalt settings
- Support for vmtouch caching
- New dark mode switch as fallback for distributions not supporting the freedesktop Dark Mode
- Prevent programs from launching when clicking on the entry instead of the play button
- Windows can now be closed by pressing Escape
- The Library view now supports program settings overrides
- “Add to Steam” and “Add Desktop Entry” now supports integrations (Epic, Ubisoft, etc.)
- The bottles-cli “programs” option now list programs from integrations as well
- Gamescope is now compatible with FSR
- Minor UI improvements
- Lots of bug fixes
- Translations updated
Not only can you load files/folders to RAM. There is also the possibility to evict them from the cache.
If you load your game before the start from your spinning rust to RAM it can be smoother.
Quoting: pseudexEverytime you read a file a copy will stay in RAM
Thank you for the explanation – from the article alone I wouldn't have guessed that vmtouch might be something I'd possibly care about.
It sounds like something that I have been looking for for a long time, without it developing enough pressure to actually bubble to the top of my activity list. Definitely going to read up on it.
fenglengshun Aug 16, 2022
I haven't been following all the recent Flatpak shift so I feel like I missed a lot. Maybe a full guide for Linux Gaming purely via Flatpak? That would be great as a singular guide to point all newbie Linux gamers towards regardless of distro.
In any case, more update is nice, but for now I have to use bottles-git because still waiting for libadwaita 1.2 to come out before non libadwaita-git bottles could be packaged again. Though I'm still not fully using it since I'm still waiting for play time count in Library mode -- hope it comes soon, because I'd be pretty to ditch Lutris once I have that, as I love to report my play/read-time for the games/VNs I play.
Last edited by fenglengshun on 16 August 2022 at 8:06 am UTC
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