Bottles

Bottles is a Wine front-end to easily manage and run Windows games (or other applications) on Linux that don't have Lutris install scripts. Some people even prefer it for games that do have a script, as Bottles only focuses on Wine. It comes with a nice user interface and has many features like LatencyFleX integrated, MangoHud and Gamescope support.

Installation

The only official way to install Bottles is through a Flatpak (it will come with sandboxing by default). Installing Wine and its optional dependencies can also help to run games.

Usage

Once installed, you should set up components and create your first bottle. “Wine prefixes” or “bottles” are basically directories where files used to run your games are stored. The file hierarchy is almost the same as a Windows installation.

To import a custom configuration, click the "⋮" button at the top right and choose “Import...”. From there, you can click on the “Configuration” option and choose your YAML configuration file. Once the import has started, cancel the Wine Mono installation if you don't need it, go through installers when prompted and wait for the import to finish. Then, go back to the main menu and into your bottle. Finally, change its settings.

But don’t import a configuration file from the bottle creation menu. It’s broken for now as it doesn’t keep some metadata (like bottle name, environment variables or selected runner). Only its dependencies seem to be imported.

Installing games

If you need to install dependencies for your apps, note that Bottles doesn’t use Winetricks. Some of them are missing compared to Winetricks but you can still install them manually.

Once you created your bottle manually or imported a configuration, you can add files to its directory. For archived games, unzip them into under the “drive_c” into the “Program Files” directory or at another location. Then, go back into your bottle settings, add a custom program shortcut and a desktop entry. You can also rename the shortcut in Bottles before doing that. For games coming with an installer, just copy the executable inside your bottle path and run it.

Some games might require a special configuration. You can check out AppDB or ProtonDB and read feedbacks from users. To avoid conflicts between game configurations, you should create one bottle per game or engine.

File Locations

The easiest way is to go to your game prefix "Details" page in Bottles, click the "⋮" button and "Browse Files...". It will open the Wine prefix in your file browser. From here, the path is the same as it would be on Windows.

If you want to find it manually, you can find the Wine prefix in ~/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles/data/bottles/bottles/<prefix>, where <prefix> is the name that you gave to the bottle.

Gamescope support

Install Gamescope, go into your bottle settings, enable “Gamescope” option in the “Display” section and configure it. Nvidia users will have to enable Direct Rendering Manager kernel mode setting to use it.

MangoHud support

Install MangoHud, go into your bottle settings and enable “Monitor Performance” option in the “Performance section”.