Despite massive adoption, Bottles faces funding shortages. The team shares its reality and asks users to help shape the project’s future.
  • frañzcoz
    39•15 days ago

    I never managed to run an application usinng bottles :/

  • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬
    20•15 days ago

    How much development is actually needed to build a graphical interface for setting the WINEPREFIX environment variable?

    • @[email protected]
      16•15 days ago

      To be fair to bottles, they cité that even their hosting costs are usually barely covered, so I imagine it’s running on a pretty lean/Foss dev budget already.

      • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬
        10•15 days ago

        They use GitHub for the code already. Their hosting cost could be pretty much zero if they would use GitHub Pages for their website, and redirect their domain to that.

    • @[email protected]English
      27•15 days ago

      Lutris is for managing games, and can use multiple different engines. Proton is one, but also Linux native games, dos, ScummVM, etc. Lutris also interfaces with popular stores like Steam, Epic, GOG etc. It’s a game and gaming library tool.

      Bottles is a general purpose wrapper for Wine. You can run games but also any wine software. It’s a general purpose wine tool.

      Lutris makes running games in proton easy. Bottles makes running apps in wine easy.

      • @[email protected]
        6•15 days ago

        Does lutris support advanced configuration of disabling enabling dxvk ,switch of locales,easy tool to install windows dependencies for usual software not games,creating full prefix backup and restoring it later on other devices ,controlling environment variables?

      • @[email protected]
        1•15 days ago

        But you can simply add windows software to Lutris, a lot of it can be found in the database with all the artwork etc.

        • @[email protected]English
          11•15 days ago

          You can do lots of things with both, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should.

          People have used Lutris for other apps because it was a more convenient wrapper for Wine than the defaults offered but it’s not primarily designed for it and support will be limited. Lutris is designed to be a games library and that’s it’s focus.

          I personally wouldn’t recommend wine newbies to be using Lutris to run everything because if nothing else it would be annoying for the Lutris dev team to be dealing with “I can’t get Microsoft Word working”.

          I also personally wouldn’t recommend Bottles for games because of all the other features Lutris offers. I have a huge library of games and I wouldn’t want to manage that in the Bottles interface. But I’m aware people use it for that and Lutris is one of its supported runners.

          Bottles and Lutris complement each other and work together well. But lutris is designed to be a games libaray while Bottles is designed to be for everything.

          I personally use Lutris for games (most of my wine use) and Bottles for a few other windows apps.

          But the real star of the show is under the hood - it’s wine and Proton doing the heavy lifting. Lutris and Bottles are tools to get the most out of them and it’s choice which you use and how.

    • MentalEdge
      11•15 days ago

      It’s not a catch-all game launcher.

      It’s a wine environment manager. And it is becoming increasingly good at simplying the complexity of setting up wine bottles for different things.

      It’s basically winetricks on steroids, with a really nice GUI to boot.

      Running windows games is just one use-case.

      • @[email protected]
        4•15 days ago

        Yeah, same with Lutris. You don’t HAVE to run games in it, it works just as well with other software

        • MentalEdge
          1•15 days ago

          Obviously. It too does wine environment management. But it’s meant for games, and for wine specifically, Bottles is just nicer.

          Lutris is massive overkill if you just want run the windows version of python in order to compile python code to windows binaries. Not to mention it just isn’t as slick in terms of UX as a wine manager.

    • @[email protected]
      3•14 days ago

      Gtk on Gnome vs Qt on Kde. I tried bottles. it’s fine. I can live without it given we now have a decent Lutris and Heroic

    • priapusEnglish
      3•15 days ago

      Better UI and many of the tools for managing wine prefixes are higher quality, rather than relying on something like Winetricks, which is actually a 20000 line bash script.

      • Mactan
        1•11 days ago

        pick your compatibility poison I guess, the ubiquitous shell or 10-15GB of flatpak dependencies

        • priapusEnglish
          1•11 days ago

          I use the Nix package, so neither. Although I also use flatpaks for other stuff so I doubt it would require many dependencies I’m not already using.

    • MwaEnglish
      2•15 days ago

      I see the advantages that.

      • Libadwaita Themed (good for Gnome bad for other Desktops)

      • Sandboxed (Only flatpak)

  • Mactan
    4•15 days ago

    I thought their priority was vanilla OS. I hope that project has the cash to survive too