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Easily run Windows software on Linux with Bottles
- hrvstr 1y agoInteresting. The UI looks way better than Lutris and Heroic Launcher. Anyone tried all three of them and went with Bottles? I first tried Lutris and then switched to Heroic, but I am not too keen about Electron apps, although Heroic works quite well.
- krs_ 1y agoI tend to use Bottles only for applications rather than games for some reason, but it works well for both. What I like about it for that use case is that it almost encourages adding multiple apps per bottle. This makes it quite easy to have one bottle for say all your dotnet apps etc.
- smackeyacky 1y agoI won’t hear a bad word said about Heroic launcher. It’s almost literally magic. Up until I tried it I was still dual booting windows on my gaming laptop. When they got GOG cloud saves to work with cyberpunk 2077 I sent them money.
- CodesInChaos 1y agoI generally like heroic, but it often has annoying bugs which persist for several months.
- unfixed 1y agoI tried those 3, and decided to go for bottles. The configuration needed in order to run Windows programms were really really easy, and I like the fact that I can keep all the Windows programs neatly organized in a single place, not only games (as Lutris and Heroic are intended to). I also tried just wine, but Bottles is a handy wrapper.
- close04 1y agoI went with Heroic for everything gaming and I have not stumbled on anything better since. I use Bottles for emulating general software.
- wetbaby 1y agoI've tried lutris and bottles and stuck with bottles. My experience with getting battle.net on lutris was miserable. After staring at the UI trying to add battle.net I was informed to go to a site, pull back a script on there and I had no indication of what it was doing to my machine. However, bottles ships with scripts to set it up for you. I created a bottle in the location I wanted, installed battle.net and logged in and it worked. Its not without problems, if I accidentally start battle.net twice, my CPU utilisation shoots up to 100% and is stuck there until I kill the bogus bottles process. There's also a problem of the battle.net bottle bricking itself completely (I have to move the game files out, delete all bottles configs and recreate the bottle) if I change the runner. Whether these issues are bottles fault or not I can't say. But concept of what a 'bottle' is is easy to understand. The configuration is very rich and works well. I pick a pick a directory, pick a runner, install what I want, enable mangohud and I'm golden.
- horsawlarway 1y agoI've used all three that you've listed (plus several more). I generally stick to Bottles whenever I can. It's a very general solution for running windows software on linux, with a nice UI. I've used it for both gaming & non-gaming applications. Everything from running battle.net on my steam deck, to Alan Wake 2 on my desktop, to running specific Victron configuration software on my laptop for programming my solar inverters. It's not perfect (occasionally recipes get out of date, and sometimes you still need to go get a specific version of Proton-GE, or download some of their dependencies manually, for example) but generally speaking... It's a pretty good interface. Keeping all the configuration/dependencies alongside the individual apps is great. It's much less "Game specific" than either Lutris or Heroic.
- Crackula 1y agoIs this some form of wine-wrapping? Or do these people code the windows emulation themselves? All of these on-top-of-wine solutions are always a cat and mouse chase when a game or app is updated. You end up with several days to weeks and sometimes eternity to get some configuration fix
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y agoOr be like me, and get Counterstrike almost working, but with some show stopping bug, continually for a decade, before giving up gaming for good only for steam Linux to be released.
- modzu 1y agoif it makes you feel any better i doubt cs runs on steam Linux
- Svip 1y agoConsidering that Valve has a native Linux release for Counter Strike (as well as all their other titles), I doubt you looked much into this.
- modzu 1y agoyeah to be fair i last looked 5 years ago.. how did they resolve anticheat? last i tried VAC was kind of a showstopper. if its evolved thats awesome
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y agoI think they basically just gave up. From what I hear VAC is a bit of a joke.
- dminik 1y agoEvery Valve game released has a native Linux version. That includes every counter strike game.
- ForOldHack 1y agoZoltan has you beat. Fresh install if Zoltan runs directx installer ( dxdiag runs perfectly ) and so does Dungeon Siege - Legends of Aranna. Perfectly. Better than windows 10. It's not listed on Bottles, so I will check back in 6 months.
- somat 1y agoFor what it's worth in a fit of nostalgia I found that dungeon siege runs well under bare wine.
- tormeh 1y agoI dunno ablut easily. If you just have some random exe installer Bottles is not super helpful. Probably easier if your software is in the Bottles catalogue.
- 63stack 1y agoIt has a literal "run executable" button. How much easier so you think it could get?
- tormeh 1y agoBut that just runs the installer. What about the program that is then installed? I remember this being a bit of a hassle, and not having a super great UX. It works, by all means, but it's just a lot worse than Windows, which is admittedly a lofty standard for exes.
- 63stack 1y agoAfter running the installer (or any exe) bottles scans the registry for certain keys (I don't know the specifics) and if it finds that new programs have been installed, it automatically adds an entry under "Programs" in the Bottles UI (which is under the "run executable" button). You also have the option to manually add installed executables under the "Programs" section, or into the "Library" section (Library is global, programs is per-bottle-sandbox)
- horsawlarway 1y agoBottles is absolutely fine for random exes... Yes - it's not entirely preconfigured for you like the recipes in their catalogues, but most runners work just fine for general windows applications. I have thrown several bottles together just to run plain ol' exe installers, and they absolutely work, in about the least effort you can put in for this sort of thing (entirely GUI based, mostly click 3 buttons and go). ex - I have a bottle for running victron VEConfigure 3 to configure solar inverters. A bottle for running Carbide Create for Carbide 3D. A bottle for running windows CAD software. Lots of random things.
- wolfi1 1y agois there somewhere a more technical description? I want to know about the technology stack before I install software which uses up several 100 MB
- guappa 1y ago"easily" until you update wine and then nothing works anymore :)
- Tajnymag 1y agoThat's one of the key points of Bottles. Wine instances are isolated from your system installation. Both the data and runtime. You update wine manually through Bottles if and when you want.
- jchw 1y agoI want to try Bottles again to see if it really does solve more problems, but I honestly find it a bit disappointing how there isn't really that great of a solution for managing Wine prefixes holistically. I always wanted to like Crossover, because I like Code Weavers, but in the end all of the solutions felt like ducktape over the problems. Which might make one think that it's hopeless, but clearly it isn't. Steam shows us that this sort of concept actually can work reliably. I don't know how Steam actually manages the prefixes, but you never have to think about it and it always chooses a known-good Proton version. Lutris seems like it wants to do the same basic thing Steam does, and it is very useful, but often times Lutris's "known good" settings somehow don't work. This is a shame, this problem feels like it can be solved and make Wine vastly more useful. (Though in the end, improving upstream Wine will always be better than trying to build layers on top of it like this... but building layers on top of it like this helps us with running Windows software now, which is still pretty useful.) Aside from having better automatic bottle management and setup of software with "known good" settings, I'd like to see more things tried. Some software doesn't actually need a persistent prefix... maybe there could be a concept of an ephemeral prefix of some sort instead, to make those softwares work more reliably. And when software does have a prefix, it sure would be useful to be able to "undo" things, using snapshots. Features like this would go a long way to make Wine prefixes easier to manage for people who are less technical.
- omnimus 1y agoIsnt proton wine version for games that Valve pays Codeweavers to make?
- BugsJustFindMe 1y agoI don't understand any of these "bottle" solutions. All they're doing is running Wine. You can already run Wine without any of this.
- Quitschquat 1y agoIt’s all about isolation I think
- tkj922 1y agoIt is a bad idea to use wine in isolation. Even if it comes with bottles
- Tajnymag 1y agoBottles has certain sandboxing capabilities on top of wine. Plus, Bottles can download and manage various wine versions, separate from your distro's offerrings. It's pretty neat. Of course, technically, you could do almost everything it offers manually via scripting and your own wrappers, but that can be said about almost any software. Heck, C and C compilers are nothing else than syntax sugar for writing assembly.
- guenthert 1y agoTo expand on this, at least historically, Wine unfortunately didn't progress in a straight line, often new versions came with additional features or bug fixes which made some applications run or run better, while others ran worse.
- aussieguy1234 1y agoWine can get quite complicated to configure. It tends to work best when each app has its own isolated wine prefix. This lets you tweak wine settings/params as needed for each app. This is how I do it for games using Lutris. I have a few games that work best on particular wine versions that won't be able to share the same prefix.
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- self_awareness 1y ago> Run Windows in a Bottle. Easily run Windows software on Linux with Bottles! What does it even mean? Is it somehow related to Gnome Boxes?
- pxc 1y agoIt's a pun on Wine, the syscall translation layer that lets you run Windows programs on Linux without hardware virtualization. A working Wine configuration includes a directory that functions as a virtual C;\ drive, has a registry, and various other settings. You can actually have multiple of these if you specify which one to use at launch time through the environment variable WINEPREFIX, which points to a directory containing the relevant config files and other data directories. A "bottle" is a user-friendly way of interacting with this functionality, managing these prefixes and their settings, and recommending known compatibility fixes for them. It may also involve managing multiple Wine versions, perhaps including some with patches. It seems comparable to a lot of older tools in the same vein like CrossOver Linux (by Codeweavers, who maintain Wine), PlayOnLinux, Lutris (gaming-focused), and Cedega (gaming-focused and defunct).
- self_awareness 1y agoThanks, your reply should be copy-pasted and put on that website. They're using terminology like "Windows prefix", which in reality appears to be a Wine prefix.
- cyphax 1y agoIt's not related to Gnome Boxes. It is an application that makes using Wine easier and more robust. The statement means to say that it allows you to run Windows applications inside an isolated environment (a "bottle").
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y agoI wonder if it wouldn't be easier to package programs directly into flatpaks or docker images (with appropriate WINE and whatever other dependencies baked in). Obviously in some cases there are licensing restrictions on redistribution, but even then it seems easier to have a per-app flatpak/container that either takes a binary you supply or downloads it for you as is appropriate.
- evolve2k 1y agoIs this an option to get creative cloud apps like photoshop running on Linux. I have a friend for whom this is the cough bottleneck to switching over.
- hackeradam17 1y agoIn all honesty, trying to shoehorn the CC apps to run on Linux just isn't a viable solution. As someone that does a ton of photo and video stuff it was a sticking point for me for quite awhile as well. Luckily, I don't make my living from my photography, so I was finally able to just dive head first into the open-source tools to start figuring out a new workflow.