Most of the games and graphic software developed only support Windows. This makes it almost impossible to test your enterprise app on different systems and its versions. Luckily, the problem is now solved thanks to the introduction of Bottles. Read to learn how to use bottles on Linux.
Bottles make you look at a Graphical Frontend or Interface for the WINE software compatibility layer. After a series of improvements, Bottles ended up providing more. It is currently one of the simple methods to generate and manage environment-based utilities.
The utility lets you run Windows apps, games, and other apps on your Linux machine.
The entire mechanism of Bottles allows different Linux OS users to run Windows OS-based applications and video games on their system. It corresponds to the Wine prefix. The prefix is eventually a directory that imitates the file system hierarchy. Remember, it comprises a “C” drive where you’ll be able to install software meant for Windows.
Features of Bottles
Before helping you learn how to use Bottles on Linux, let’s dedicate some time to uncovering the prime features of this utility:
- A fully integrated installer with which you can manage installed apps and games. The fact that the community constantly manages it makes it even more promising.
- Easy to manage through pre-configured environments ready for gaming or using Apps.
- Automatically detects all the installed apps and shows them to the program list.
- Simplified DDL overrides make the overall process seamless.
- Allows to run every executable like .exe, .msi, .bat
- Easy to back up, clone, and restore the bottle(s) you create.
- Supports custom environments to run apps.
- Integrated task manager.
- Easy to access ProtonDB and WineHQ utilities.
- Provides various optimizations for gaming.
- Checking for auto-update is also possible.
Prerequisite
You must first install bottles to install Windows apps and games on Linux. Now, this is available as AppImage, Snap, Flatpak, and DEB packages. The same is again maintained on Fedora and AUR.
There are a few methods to install Bottles on Linux. The most efficient ones include:
- Flatpak
- AUR
- Fedora
1. Using Flatpak (Recommended)
Flatpak provides the full sandboxed version, so all the dependencies are bundled in one package. Make sure you have Flatpak installed on your Linux machine to continue. If not, launch the Terminal and run the following command to install the flatpak utility:
Run the following command to enable the flathub repo:
From there, install Bottles using the application ID. The process will look something like this:
2. Using AUR
Don’t like the Flatpak method? Well then, you can use the AUR instead. Launch the Terminal and invoke either of the following commands:
yay -S bottles
paru -S bottles
3. Using DNF
Use the following command to install bottles using the following command:
$ sudo dnf install bottles
It will take a few minutes to download and install bottles.
Run Windows Apps and Games on Linux using Bottles
Once bottles are ready, we can begin using Windows apps on Linux. The whole process can be a bit challenging, but not if you tend to follow the right approach. Wondering what the appropriate approach looks like? Here is the answer.
First, launch the app using the app menu or using the following command:
That command will pop open the corresponding Bottles welcome on your screen like this:
Click on “Next”. This will help you see an installation screen. From there, click the “Install” button.
This step might take some heavy seconds or minutes to complete. Once done, you will see a similar screen attached below. From there, you have to click on the “Close” button
Until this point, you know how you can wrap up the installation. Now proceed as follows:
Creating a Brand New Bottle
In case you don’t know, the first step to installing any app or game with Bottles is creating a new Bottle for it. You will use the newly created bottle to execute different applications. For employing the latest version of Bottles, find and click on the “Create new Bottle” button.
Once you click that button, you will see a dedicated prompt to enter a filename. From there, you can select the working environment. You will need to use it to run all your desired applications. Some of the crucial/major environments are:
- Gaming Bottle: With the Gaming bottle, you’re looking at a utility that focuses on gaming. This eventually comes with some unique pair of settings or configurations to run CPU-intensive tasks.
- Application Bottle: This bottle comes with the ability to run Windows Desktop apps.
- Custom Bottle: It is meant to help create a
custom bottlewith no pre-made configuration. The primary goal is to help users create whatever they want to.
As an example, we will head over and install PowerISO. For those who don’t know, it is a powerful Windows app that helps process DEV and BG images.
As soon as you end up clicking the create button, Bottles will start generating a configuration file. This helps run the new app as smoothly as possible. After you are done with it, you will get to see Bottle Created pop on your screen.
On the home screen of Bottles, you can see the new Bottle you just created.
You can click on the corresponding bottle to open the configuration page. Now, click on the “Run Executables” button to install the PowerISO utility. This will launch your system’s file manager. Finally, select the PowerISO.exe file and that’s it.
Once done, you will see the installation screen popup. After that, click the “Utility” section that gives you many features to tweak the configuration.
Now let’s fast forward the things to open the installed app on your Bottles.
Using Bottles on Linux
- Open bottles app
- Go to the programs section to see a list of all the apps you installed.
- Select the icons to start or stop the application.
That wraps up the tutorial. Here, we’ve learned how to install the Windows app on Linux. Not just that, we’ve even shown how we can run them. Just like installing the app, you can install games with installers like steam, epic games, etc. Post downloading the game or app, you can proceed via simple taps and install the utility on your system.
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