How much development is actually needed to build a graphical interface for setting the WINEPREFIX environment variable?
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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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.
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.
I think they host wine/proton releases at least, maybe more
Which can be hosted on GitHub as well.
I never managed to run an application usinng bottles :/
I used it for non-steam games for a while because Lutris is a broken mess
huh. what breaks for you in lutris? i works pretty well for me.
I don't think I've installed a single game that I didn't have to fight with for hours to fix the install script
i don't think most of those scripts are maintained. i will usually just add the game manually through lutris. it works every time first try.
you shouldn't bother with scripts. when it doesn't work with the defaults (and that hasnt happened in ages for me) take a look on protondb.
Same here. I run apps in Heroic games launcher
I use Steam by adding apps as non-steam games and forcing it to use Proton.
Another option. lol
I'm using bottles to run Roon. Works great and was easy.
I never understood the advantage Bottles has over Lutris
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
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.
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?
Yes
While I agree with the rest, does Lutris have backup options? I never actually checked, but don't remember seeing any of that
But you can simply add windows software to Lutris, a lot of it can be found in the database with all the artwork etc.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, same with Lutris. You don't HAVE to run games in it, it works just as well with other software
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.
I see the advantages that.
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Libadwaita Themed (good for Gnome bad for other Desktops)
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Sandboxed (Only flatpak)
Looks pretty
I thought their priority was vanilla OS. I hope that project has the cash to survive too