from Hacker News

Bottles – Easily run Windows software on Linux

by manaskarekar on 7/4/23, 9:47 PM with 188 comments

• by themoonisachees on 7/5/23, 7:56 AM

  Bottles for me fills a very specific niche that nobody else does: launching multiple apps in the same prefix.

  For example, if I want to launch Titanfall 2+ Northstar, I need to launch a Northstar launcher in the same prefix as the EA launcher (nowadays these Northstar launchers have a button to launch the EA launcher so it's no longer an issue but still). Each bottle feels like a separate windows install, so if you need a dependency that's not bundled you can just press the big "launch program from file" button and go on with your day.

  Games that are DRM free and programs that you download on windows in general can be installed in proton or lutris but doing it always feels like a hack. On the flip side, using bottles is just "launch installer, an entry for the installed program is added". It really is a fantastic piece of software.

• by carlosrg on 7/5/23, 12:05 PM

  GNOME applications look so... mobile. Large controls, large title bars that lack maximize/minimize, simplistic layouts. It might be good for this kind of frontend apps but I can't see software like Krita or KDEnlive being done for GTK4/GNOME as of today (for reference: https://kdenlive.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/271174170_10...)

• by antman on 7/5/23, 4:04 AM

  We are in a family crisis here, can any of the solutions run roblox after their botched anti cheat update?

• by mordae on 7/4/23, 10:44 PM

  Just use Lutris. It can fetch various flavours of wine and manage your bottles.

  https://lutris.net/

• by mrpippy on 7/4/23, 10:22 PM

  Basically a free clone of CrossOver, which has used “bottles” to refer to separate Wine prefixes for 20 years.

  (disclaimer: I work for CodeWeavers)

• by jaimex2 on 7/5/23, 2:55 AM

  Between Steam and Heroic Launcher ( Epic and GOG client) I've been having a really good gaming experience on Linux. Things just work and the UIs are really polished.

  This looks great too.

  Get the FlatPak version of Heroic Launcher as it does a lot of tricks out of the box, like letting you be seen as online by friends to be added directly to games, cloud save and dealing with DRM

• by jzombie on 7/4/23, 11:37 PM

  Cool, but after reading "All the gaming platforms you already know, right here" and searching for Xbox Game Pass or Forza Horizon and finding nothing, I gave up.

• by GlassOwAter on 7/5/23, 12:46 AM

  Will this allow me to run Photoshop on Linux? That’s the big thing keeping me from switching.

• by canadiantim on 7/4/23, 10:23 PM

  Using Bottles to play ultima online again, my productivity wishes it hadn’t been possible tho

• by rpigab on 7/5/23, 9:55 AM

  I have tried to use Bottles on my Steam Deck, because I have old CDs of Windows XP and older games, like Wacky Races, Re-Volt, etc., I can copy the files off the CD, into a folder on my Steam Deck and then run the installer as a non-Steam Game with Proton compatibility, and the installer runs and even manages the video test that's sometimes present in game installers, but after this I need to run the game.

  I can edit the non-steam game and use the installed game path, but then it fails to launch because some of these games used to require that the game CD was present in the CD reader, obviously I don't carry it around and plug it in he Deck, this is why I've tried the same thing using Bottles but I'm not sure if I can easily mount a CD or ISO or folder this way, and only in the context of launching a game, not persistent. I have to look further into this and also check Lutris maybe, but if someone knows how to solve this, I'd be glad to hear about it!

  For some games, it might be easier to patch it and remove the CD check...

  For Re-Volt, a community engine and launcher exists, RVGL, which makes it way easier.

• by marinhero on 7/4/23, 11:20 PM

  I only use Windows because of gaming purposes. Is there anything around the internet that can show benchmarks for something like Bottles vs Proton vs Windows? WSL works well but I’d personally want to stay stick to native and not dual boot.

• by RangerScience on 7/4/23, 10:50 PM

  How’s gaming performance? (It’s pretty much the only reason I still use Windows at all)

• by dang on 7/5/23, 12:25 AM

  Related:

  Bottles: GUI front end to run Windows software on Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29612976 - Dec 2021 (237 comments)

• by leipert on 7/5/23, 5:10 AM

  Semi-related: Having no windows machine or console, I recently tried out one of those gaming streaming services to play Diablo IV and wow: 10 bucks/month to be able to play it without the need to tinker with anything or building a PC.

  Getting 30ms latency is good enough for this casual gamer.

• by thriftwy on 7/4/23, 10:09 PM

  This reminds me of playonlinux tool which does the same with reasonable success.

• by Thaxll on 7/4/23, 11:54 PM

  So what should we use between native wine, lutris etc ...?

• by Kalanos on 7/4/23, 10:34 PM

  Can I use this and docker at the same time?

• by Kalanos on 7/4/23, 10:36 PM

  I attempted to use Wine yesterday to run a Windows app and it failed. How is this different from Wine?

• by tohnjitor on 7/5/23, 1:35 AM

  Can it run any Autodesk software?

• by minroot on 7/4/23, 11:59 PM

  I wish they had a repository of common softwares.

• by shmerl on 7/5/23, 12:19 AM

  I just do it manually with my own scripts.

• by XorNot on 7/4/23, 10:52 PM

  Can this run MS Teams is my question?

• by jumperabg on 7/5/23, 6:59 AM

  Can it run League Of Legends?

• by Animats on 7/5/23, 12:00 AM

  Oh, it's a GUI for Winetricks. Correct?

• by geocrasher on 7/5/23, 12:21 AM

  While the Windows OS is far from perfect, it's always going to be better than one of these emulator projects. I know that wine is mature etc etc but at the end of the day, if you want to run Windows software, just run Windows.

• by pipeline_peak on 7/4/23, 10:08 PM

  What’s the point of this isolated “bottle” concept? It seems like the bloated nature of containers is now pouring into emulation.

  Why fix underlying problems when you can just put things in a bottle/container? Like that won’t use more resources.