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 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’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.
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 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 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?
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 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.
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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
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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.
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.
Why are the sponsors not enough? How big is the overhead on this project if multiple companies can’t keep it afloat?
Right now, what little money I can spare goes to World Central Kitchen. Money is just too tight these days. I’d consider contributing to the project, but only if the repositories were moved somewhere other than Github/Microsoft.
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.
