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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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.
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?
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.
I have felt the same way about the fediverse projects.
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.
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.
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.
Original Source: https://usebottles.com/posts/2025-07-06-bottles-need-help/
- Last time I checked, Github required a credit card for its paid stuff.
- PayPal is a privacy nightmare. LiberaPay does accept the usual SEPA wire transfers and debit collects, but only if the recipient accepts them, too.
- Patreon only accepts credit cards or PayPal.
- Crypto… is crypto
- Polar only accepts credit cards and whatever the hell „Cash App Pay” is.
I have access to none of these options, except SEPA iff Bottles accepts it.
I have a feeling that fundraisers would get a lot more funding if they weren’t so US-centric. I’m German. I don’t need a goddamn credit card. I have money. And I don’t want some private company snooping through my accounts.
What’s the problem you see with crypto? I think it’s a good platform for payments, especially if it’s fully anonymous like Monero. And no, I don’t care that it’s used for scams. It doesn’t have to be. Just don’t buy shitcoins and you’re good.
This only moves the question. What payment methods does the currency exchange accept? What are the transaction fees there? Also crypto is way to volatile for my liking. Crypto bros may claim that states can devalue currencies at any time, but ever since BTC was invented, the Euro has been orders of magnitude more stable than any cryptocurrency.
I’m also in Germany. Most banks offer either a credit or debit Visa or MasterCard, with the debit version usually being accepted like a credit card would be, excluding some edge cases.
Even Sparkassen seem to slowly be transitioning to that option, though it took them 10 years longer than everyone else. So, unless you don’t want to use a Visa or MasterCard for philosophical reasons (which I could understand, their stranglehold on the market is very annoying), your bank probably offers something that would be accepted there.
In Germany you essentialy have the choice between a debit card or a Girocard, why anyone would choose a Girocard instead of a debit card is a real headscratcher for me. So many disadvantages for only a few advantages. Especially if you consider that many banks without a debit card also have fees just for having an existing account and often times you can‘t even get money from every atm without fees. So while i underdzanf your points i don‘t think taking a credit card is US centric at all, it is just the superior card.
From my quick internet search it seems that these “bank-issued” debit cards are all either a rebranded MasterCard or rebranded Visa. Both American companies. Given how unpredictable their government behaves recently, and how recklessly the banking sector has behaving for decades now, I would rather not rely on them for something as essential as my bank account.
With SEPA transfer your choice of “card” is totally irrelevant. This has been a thing for decades (at least half a century, even before SEPA existed) to transfer money from one account to another. It’s easy and straightened. Nowadays it’s even quick.
I never understood why people felt a need for PayPal when you could just as easily send someone money. And if you wanted something with more customer protection there’s “Bankeinzug” for which I don’t even know if an English word exists. You basically give a company permission to pull the money from your account. In case of fraudulent activity you can retroactively revoke that permission.
Bankeinzug
is Direct debit.
Using crypto for international transactions is the intended purpose and has no connection to the shitcoin speculation that people associate with the name, and refusing to use it because of that is absolute puritan nonsense (people get scammed with regular money too, are you going to cease transaction over that?)
GitHub allows you to use a debit card, at least in the US. You might want to check again.
You prompted me to read up on these things. It turns out that Germany has been cooking their own debit card scheme (Girocard) for the last 20 years, and it’s incompatible with the rest of the world. But banks seem to be transitioning towards Visa or Mastercard.
Github doesn’t accept Girocards.
TBH, I’m not a fan of yet another entanglement with US-based companies for something as simple as moving money.
What is your preferred payment method?
I’ve considered payment systems many times and there is no “free” option outside of Taler, which requires your bank to support it, and the bank doesn’t give a shit about your freedom. And frankly, most people don’t either.
My preferred payment method is wire transfer. I instruct my bank to move x monies from my bank account to someone else’s bank account. No need for a third party.
That costs money and is very insecure.
[Edit:
It does not and it is not. What the fuck are you talking about?Why do you think it’s insecure and what costs are associated with it?]I don’t think it’s insecure, I know it is. I work in an industry where tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars are stolen on a regular basis. If you accidentally wire the funds to the wrong account, there is no recourse. And there are scammers targeting these types of transactions.
If you accidentally wire the funds to the wrong account, there is no recourse.
Well, duh. That’s not what I’d call insecure. If you only accept a system as “secure” if it is resistant to any user error, then I propose you keep away from knives, cars, electricity, staircases, and basically everything.
You also didn’t provide any rationale for the “costs money” part of your statement.
Maybe it’s different in Germany, but at least in the US, wire transfers have a fee. My bank even charges me $5 just to receive a wire transfer, and if I wanted to send money internationally it’s a $65 fee. It’s a terrible system to buy things too because it takes days for the transfer to clear.
Another comment mentioned ACH, but that is not the same as a wire transfer.
I propose you keep away from knives, cars, electricity, staircases, and basically everything
Yeah, I mean, why wouldn’t I do that when possible?
You also didn’t provide any rationale for the “costs money” part of your statement.
I don’t know what you’re expecting of me. ACH transfers cost money. It’s as simple as that.
I had trouble with Bottles but Lutris just works
Yeah I also just go Lutris for all my non steam games.
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.
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.
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.
We don’t want to make Wikipedia-style appeals
do it
