Why Bottles?
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Bottles was born in 2017 as a personal need. I needed a practical way to manage my wineprefixes. I hate the idea of using applications that install me a version of wine for each application and I decided to create this application, based on the concept of using one or more wine prefixes as a "container" for all my applications.
In 2020 thanks to Valve, we have access to Proton. An optimized version of Wine for gaming. Thanks also to other projects like DXVK/VKD3D/Esync/Fsync/Shader compiler and others, we can run a large set of video games designed for Windows, on Linux.
The idea of creating an environment-based wineprefix manager comes from the standardization of dependencies and parameters necessary to run a game. On the other hand, we have software (often not up to date) that require environments and configurations different from those used in gaming. Hence the idea of managing separate environments.
Because they are similar but different applications. I want to create environments that contain more applications and games and where the wine version can be updated.
I also want to be able to export my bottles allowing easy sharing, with or without applications. In POL/Lutris we have the concept of "with this version of wine and these changes it works". In Bottles the concept is "this is my wine bottle, I want to install this software".
The goal with this version is also to integrate with the system in the best possible way. Being able to decide in a few bottles to run an .exe/.msi file and have control over it without having to open Bottles for each operation.
Bottles is close to what wineprefix means, since v.2 it provides a simplified method to generate environment-based bottles and thanks to other tools it simplifies the management but nothing more.
There are some features that make Bottles unique:
a powerful, integrated and written from scratch based on a and easy to expand repository
version control to easily (goodbye disasters)
management based on pre-configured ready for Gaming or Software, with the most common dependencies pre-installed and an ad hoc configuration to immediately run a lot of software, you can also configure your environment from scratch
(via Flatpak)
easy config or full export and import, also cloning
, no need to manually add to the programs list
360° of the whole environment without having to go through winecfg
a fully integrated also based on a repository
and much, much more. to discover all the features we have designed to make it easier for you to run Windows software on Linux!