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Bottles helps run Windows apps (especially games) on Linux. They have their own installers and updates channel. Generally when using Linux, you will usually ins

Bottles helps run Windows apps (especially games) on Linux. They have their own installers and updates channel. Generally when using Linux, you will usually install software from the Linux distribution's (like operating system flavor) software repository. It makes dependency management simpler, you get updates only after they're tested, etc. Those repositories are officially supported by the Linux distribution team (which could be employees for a company like Canonical, or volunteers) but not officially supported by the Bottles team. Bottles is asking the various Linux distributions to stop offering Bottles through the distribution repositories. The Bottles team wants to own the relationship with the end-user under their own terms: only recent versions, only installers that were tested by them personally, and they will support the community issues. Today distros often deliver older versions and modified installers, while still sending the community to get support from the Bottles team.

Night_Thastus 4y ago
That clears it up mostly, I think. Thanks! How do other software creators deal with this problem? I can see how getting reports for issues could be frustrating if they weren't easy to replicate due to the distribution having a different version of that software.
- rsstack 4y ago
  I think it's a complicated question to answer because there are so many possible combinations. 1. Simpler software doesn't usually have issues with broken installers. 2. A lot of software doesn't get frequent-enough updates that old versions would matter. 3. High-profile projects usually have personal connections with the major distributions' packaging team (or even a "personal union", where it's actually the same people). And there are other cases. I think Bottles got stuck in a spot where their software is _very_ complicated to install correctly, updates often (young project + interactions with 3rd party software such as games), and they're a small team that doesn't have a way to work efficiently with the distributions.
  - mjw1007 4y ago
    4. A lot of modern software would be so painful to package that nobody can face packaging it anyway.
- arccy 4y ago
  once you get enough reports, you recognize the pattern, and close them as "packaging/distro error" and kick the can back to the distros
- Gigachad 4y ago
  >How do other software creators deal with this problem? They embed time bombs in their software to berate the Debian maintainers for leaving ancient versions of packages up.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
Anki does something similar by telling Linux users to not use the version from their distro's repo and to instead install from the Anki site, citing misconfiguration on the part of distros. The problem with this is that all they have available on their site for Linux users is source tarballs which the user is then expected to build themselves, which leads to some of the same problems that come up with distro builds. I think it's legitimate for projects to not want to be included in distro repos to avoid problems with misconfiguration and the like (though I think it's probably better to design the project such that this kind of failure isn't possible), but doing that should go hand in hand with providing officially supported binaries in some way, whether that be via flatpak, AUR, custom PPA's, etc so there's always an option that is known to be built correctly.

Night_Thastus 4y ago

That clears it up mostly, I think. Thanks! How do other software creators deal with this problem? I can see how getting reports for issues could be frustrating if they weren't easy to replicate due to the distribution having a different version of that software.

rsstack 4y ago
I think it's a complicated question to answer because there are so many possible combinations. 1. Simpler software doesn't usually have issues with broken installers. 2. A lot of software doesn't get frequent-enough updates that old versions would matter. 3. High-profile projects usually have personal connections with the major distributions' packaging team (or even a "personal union", where it's actually the same people). And there are other cases. I think Bottles got stuck in a spot where their software is _very_ complicated to install correctly, updates often (young project + interactions with 3rd party software such as games), and they're a small team that doesn't have a way to work efficiently with the distributions.
- mjw1007 4y ago
  4. A lot of modern software would be so painful to package that nobody can face packaging it anyway.
arccy 4y ago
once you get enough reports, you recognize the pattern, and close them as "packaging/distro error" and kick the can back to the distros
Gigachad 4y ago
>How do other software creators deal with this problem? They embed time bombs in their software to berate the Debian maintainers for leaving ancient versions of packages up.

kitsunesoba 4y ago

Anki does something similar by telling Linux users to not use the version from their distro's repo and to instead install from the Anki site, citing misconfiguration on the part of distros. The problem with this is that all they have available on their site for Linux users is source tarballs which the user is then expected to build themselves, which leads to some of the same problems that come up with distro builds. I think it's legitimate for projects to not want to be included in distro repos to avoid problems with misconfiguration and the like (though I think it's probably better to design the project such that this kind of failure isn't possible), but doing that should go hand in hand with providing officially supported binaries in some way, whether that be via flatpak, AUR, custom PPA's, etc so there's always an option that is known to be built correctly.