cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/227964
There used to be a time when Linux gaming was a tricky affair, filled with trial and error, obscure fixes, and things randomly breaking. Many gamers used to avoid gaming on the platform due to those issues.
Now? Things have changed dramatically. Tools like Wine, Proton, DXVK, etc. have taken Linux gaming to another level. Bottles is one of those handy tools helping make the experience that much easier for gamers.
Sadly, the project has hit a funding roadblock.
Hard Work Deserves Appreciation
The lead developer behind Bottles, Mirko Brombin, recently shared an update on the project’s current state. He points out that, while Bottles has sponsorships from companies like Linode, JetBrains, and Hyperbit, they are still facing funding shortages that make sustained development difficult.
Despite having over 3 million downloads on Flathub, the project receives only about €100 per month in donations, an amount easily overshadowed by the server costs alone.
That sounds concerning. 🫤
Mirko also brought attention to Bottles Next, a complete rewrite of the app designed to modernize the codebase and improve performance. He said that they are still working on it, and while it’s due sometime in the future, continued support from Bottles users will help the team focus on development and deliver a better product faster.
He further added:
I am actively working to find sponsorships, I am in contact with a possible funding that could allow us to accelerate development, to pay a small bonus to those working on Next, to give some breathing room to those who are contributing. But here too, it takes time. And that’s precisely why today I feel the need to speak openly.
We don’t want to make Wikipedia-style appeals, with the usual “just one euro each.” But it’s right that those who love Bottles know how things really are. If you want to see Next grow, if you want to see Bottles finally become what it’s meant to be, we invite you to consider supporting us. Even just a symbolic donation, even just a monthly subscription, if done by many, can become what we need to take the next step.
If you use Bottles and want to see it grow, even a small donation helps more than you might think. Supporting the project now means faster updates and a better experience down the line.
Suggested Read 📖
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I am slowly starting to spend more time in the FOSS world again and will soon move my main system to Linux (also again after a long break with Linux only being on spare laptops).
I want to put money into it and now can afford to. In this particular case I honestly never used the tool. Bazzite came with Lutris and it blew me away. Can anyone point to a good comparison between the two?
When people complain about software being monetized and closed instead of everything being FOSS and I say people want to put food on their tables… This is exactly why. Most of the projects that have a good deal of recurring donations are some form of productivity software. Companies or freelancers use them to make money on a daily basis and decide to give back a bit, to ensure that their software continues being developed (large corporate donors sometimes also get a say in what features are prioritized).
Nobody sets up a recurring donation for a neat bit of software that makes life easier, but isn’t making the user any money.
It’s GPL, just like the Fediverse prefers it. Single most recommended launcher in the Linux gaming community in recent years. And the owner makes €100 a month off it. AND there are people in this very thread saying people shouldn’t donate to it because you could instead fund Wine development by buying a Crossover license (yay, proprietary software). Then another unrelated comment pointing out you can donate directly to Wine too. Then another comment saying they don’t like how FOSS projects often don’t disclose where the money’s going.
Well guess what, open source devs want money so they’d no longer be dependent on their soul-sucking corporate day jobs and have more time to develop neat open source software. Open source devs are often overworked and some receive a lot of abuse for not spending more time on their open source projects. Orchestrated abuse for not spending enough time on his open source project is how the author of xz was pressured to give maintainer status to what turned out to be a nation state level actor trying to integrate a backdoor into everyone’s Linux systems.
The open source community is abusive towards open source maintainers, really. I’m honestly glad I only have some small contributions to my name, and no large projects to maintain.
To be clear: No, I’m not any better when it comes to donations. I’m more likely to pay for proprietary software than to donate to an open source project I use. Same goes for most people I reckon. That’s why, while open source is awesome, actually being an open source dev sucks.
I installed Bottles once. It didnt work a single bit.
also, There is already a way to seperate wine apps. Its called wine prefixes, autogenerated with just about every wine frontend.
Why are the sponsors not enough? How big is the overhead on this project if multiple companies can’t keep it afloat?
If I had money to spend on FOSS projects, this is definitely one of the ones I’d support. I likely will from next month onwards.
Probably better to buy Crossover and thus fund the people actually developing Wine instead of some project blowjng $100 on server costs for a Wine wrapper.
Yeah not sure why their server costs are so high… But I’m sure there will also be people who won’t want to use CrossOver because it isn’t FOSS (which I think is fair enough) and so for them, supporting bottles is probably a good option
I never even heard of Bottles, but it seems to me that free/opensource software gets into trouble like this when it tries to go bigtime by hiring a fulltime paid staff. If everything remained a side project that grew at the pace of however much time people had available to devote to it, wouldn’t it avoid overwhelming server costs and having to beg for money?
Bottles is a very convenient way of managing individual wine prefixes. With its GUI it’s very easy to install dependencies and change settings. I can highly recommend checking it out. I use it not just for programs, but also games as it’s just easier to use than having to use winetricks.
It would, we’d also have more projects like freecad that are objectively great all things considered, but that gets absolutely slaughtered because they’re not up to the standard of a professional program even though they’ve been in development for 15 years. Also why do you expect people to work for free?
I wish we had some sort of libre “package” platform to donate to.
I’d drop $10 a month to support the myriad of libre software I use, but they’re so many I can’t hunt down how, and I’ll end up forgetting to support some invisible package that’s actually super important.
Honestly thats a great idea. I think it could be possible to implement it but don’t know what the hurdles would be at this point in time
I have felt the same way about the fediverse projects.
I mean…it’s not very good though. I’ve used it a handful of times and decided it wasn’t needed. I can just use Lutris or Steam or just straight up Wine itself and they all work better than Bottles.
I’m having no problems with donating to OSS projects, yet what always prevents me from doing so is when such projects are not transparent where my donation money actually goes.
Yet, the average donations we receive are around 100 euros per month. A sum that doesn’t even cover server costs or the resources we use.
Well, I see no linked explanation where this money goes or why the server costs are so high, which is immediately a red flag for me.
Hello Hyprland. for 5 Euros a month you’ll have access to “Hyprland premium” which has yet to be disclosed as to what Hyprland premium even is.
that compositor is just shady front and back with a very questionable dev and maintainers.
thank you for justifying my dislike of the name
I don’t know how much of the 3 million installs I represent but I installed it, found the whole process to create a bottle an unnecessary hurdle and didn’t see any functional benefits over the five or so alternatives that also aim to make Windows software compatible with Linux. The Gnome headerbar UI also is alien on both game and desktop modes of SteamOS.
So I uninstalled it.
I am similar.
I have found the process to be rather overly complicated; though I do recognize some benefit in more granular control in certain areas. Between running different versions of wine and proton, I have been able to do everything I’ve needed to and wanted to do with far less steps and time invested into the setup. I haven’t really thought about bottles again until now.
However, I do think that it is important to support projects like these anyway – as gaming on Linux is one of the few consistent barriers for people switching over from windows or mac; just because it isn’t my cup of tea or that I personally don’t see the benefit of it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a whole community of people who prefer to use bottles and enjoy the fine control over runners and such. In a larger sense, I think supporting them would be supporting gaming on Linux as a whole.
Same installed found useless and now just sits there.
In a larger sense, I think supporting them would be supporting gaming on Linux as a whole.
Bottles and similar projects don’t develop the underlying technology, though. That’s Wine. Bottles is a front-end with a bunch of support scripts.
Very true! But I think how said technology is presented and making it easier to use or more understandable to certain people goes a long way.
Sort of like public intellectuals and hardcore academics. Hardcore academics are the ones driving forward new innovations for a particular field of study or another. Public intellectuals make said field of study more accessible to the public by providing descriptions and explanations in various laymen terms.
In a similar way, bottles may make using wine or different wine versions easier for some; or maybe the process of creating and setting up a bottle clicks better and makes the most sense for them.
Original Source: https://usebottles.com/posts/2025-07-06-bottles-need-help/
How expensive are the server costs? The website can be hosted from Github Pages since it’s all static and the forums feature are also on Github aswell. For installing Bottles, I’m pretty sure that is handled by flathub.org
The website is actually hosted on GitHub pages.
Just type in a random non-existing path and it shows the GitHub pages 404 path.
I installed Bottles for one application, Hex Kit which is an indie application for making hex maps and I couldn’t get it working on Linux, and it didn’t work. Idk if it’s a me thing, but that was a perfect example of something I’d have expected Bottles to easily have solved but didn’t.
Why not just use the Linux version directly?
“…and I couldn’t get it working on Linux…”
The Linux native version does not work for me on Arch Linux. Maybe it’s a Wayland thing or something, I don’t really know, but it doesn’t work out of the box and I don’t even know where to begin troubleshooting it.
I don’t even know where to begin troubleshooting it.
Not really your task, though. You are a paying customer and the developer needs to accommodate you, not the other way around. Easiest way should be that the developer provides a Flatpak version.
Linux doesn’t have a stable target to develop against, unless you happen to distribute your software via Steam and their Linux Runtime fits your needs.
Its easy to blame the developers, but its less easy to support a piece of software long term in a platform that is having a years long debate about which display protocol to use and if a program should be able to know the window position or not.
Which is why I prefer libre software anyway, somebody will fix it.
Linux doesn’t have a stable target to develop against
That’s an often repeated lie. https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/available-runtimes.html
Most flatpak runtimes only have 2 years or support, or in the case of the GNOME runtime 1 year lol.
So yeah you have a “stable” target for a few years at most, then the new runtime comes, breaks something and the project ends up using an EOL runtime, like OBS or more recently prusa slicer.
Nobody is forced to use Flatpaks. Which is great, because they suck.
Your personal bias against Flatpak is irrelevant to the lie that no stable development target exists.
It exists. That’s a fact, whether you like it or not doesn’t matter.
Sure, that’s great in theory, but the program is old and I’m not gonna contact the dev to fix up a more permanent version for a €15 software I got plenty of value out of on windows.
The point of me bringing this up was to say bottles didn’t work for this program and it was just working on windows 10/11 without issue.
