Release day 2021.11.28

It’s Release Day again!

Another two weeks have passed and we are here with a new release, full of new features, improvements and bugfixes.

News

Ok now let’s get to the point. What’s new in this version?

New Task Manager

Like an operating system, a bottle has its own instance of WINE with more or less processes. These in several cases it is useful to have them under control, also to understand if a program is still running or if it has crashed.

In previous releases Bottles offered a global task manager, not very intuitive and it was impossible to tell if a process was running on one bottle rather than another. In this release we have revised it and it is now offered per bottle.

In fact it will only show the processes of the bottle we are viewing, making it easy for the user to browse the processes. At any time it is possible to restart the process scan by clicking on the circular arrow in the headerbar.

New Downloader

Bottles is heavily dependent on downloads, from the very first start where it downloads its essential components to start working.

To install new Runners, DXVK, VKD3D, dependencies, installers it is necessary to go through the Download manager. Before this release we didn’t have a real manager for these downloads and everything was managed by the Components manager. In this release the Download Manager makes its entry promising more performant downloads.

Performance aside, there are also news on the CLI side, because in addition to better managing the update of the download progress in the GUI, we have also integrated a progress bar via CLI.

UI Improvements

In this release we worked to make the UI a bit more polished and consistent. In some cases, visual feedback of the operations in progress was not provided, leading the user to click multiple times or restart the application.

The most notable changes are in the removal and repair of a bottle, in fact before it seemed that Bottles was not carrying out any operation, now instead the entry in the list is blocked and a spinner is displayed indicating that something is happening.

Many behaviors have also been reworked, for example when you press a button that performs operations that take a few seconds, this is momentarily disabled, preventing the user from requesting the same operation.

When the task is completed it is reactivated, allowing a new request.

Improved installers

Although still an experimental feature, the Installers are actively developed and also in this release they have received important updates to improve the user experience.

These are manifests that contain instructions that Bottles executes to replicate an environment and install a program. Before this release, the steps were performed in order and when a dependency was requested or an executable started, it was not expected to finish installing or running. This in many cases resulted in the installer appearing as running, when in fact some operations were still running in the background.

In this release every dependency and executable (both automatic and waiting for user input) is expected, so the installer is marked installed only when the whole process is actually finished.

Among the new features we also find support for the experimental installer for Battle.net.

You can try it by enabling the experiment from the Bottles preferences, then creating a new bottle and selecting the installer from the Installers section.

The Console patch

The wineconsole (the terminal integrated in WINE), is used in the Bottles Flatpak to give the user access to the CMD and the Debug console.

We found this tool very useful but also very difficult to read, for this reason in this release we have decided to apply a “corrective” patch to the creation of each new bottle, to improve its reading (and look).

In first place we updated the color scheme with more brilliant colors, then increased the font size and the family to make it easier to read. This is a small fix that we hope will be appreciated, let us have some feedback.

All other changes

There are a lot of other changes and improvements in this release. Below are other noteworthy ones, for all the others, refer to the GiHub organization.

• Introducing a new Downloader for better performance, chunked downloads and CLI progress reporting
• The Task manager is now per bottle and only list processes running inside it
• By creating a bottle a patch is applied to wineconsole to improve reading
• Bottle duplication is now asynchroneous
• Repairing a broken bottle provides a visual feedback in the bottles list
• Deleting a bottle provides a visual feedback in the bottles list
• Now installers wait for dependencies and executables to finish before move to next step
• Bottle details view has been reworked to be more easy to extend
• Now corrupted downloaded files are automatically removed if checksum is not matching
• Now when Bottles creates a registry key, it will wait for any previous keys to be created to avoid corrupting the registry
• The Remove option is now hidden for auto-discovered programs
• Now automated environments only install most used fonts instead of the allfonts package
• The VKD3D is no more enabled by default in Gaming environment
• Removed double title in bottles list
• The documentation hub now has new hints for Flatpak users
• Fixed a bug in Downloader that was failing when it is not able to estimate the download size
• Fixed a bug in bottle duplication that was looping in symlinked directories
• Fixed a bug in bottle creation that was failing on essential components check
• Fixed a bug in wrong encoding of command output
• Fixed a bug in Onboard that was freezing the app during component installation
• Fixed a bug in components download that was crashing when it is not able to reach the repository
• Fixed a bug in wineboot that was updating instead of initializing during bottle creation
• Fixed a bug that prevent scrolling in the bottle list
• Fixed a bug in sandbox that was not unlinking the Windows Templates folder
• Fixed the TypeError: Must be number, not NoneType error thanks to @dogabone
• Fixed the Custom environment in bottle creation
• Fixed changing Windows version for win64 bottles
• Fixed virtual desktop support switching
• Spanish translations thanks to @oscfdezdz
• Turkish translations thanks to @ersen0
• Chinese (Simplified) translations thanks to @sr093906
• Hungarian translations thanks to @ovari
• French translations thanks to @julroy67
• Norwegian Bokmål translations thanks to @comradekingu
• Portuguese (Brazil) translations thanks to @vitorhcl
• Finnish translations thanks to Jiri Grönroos
• Japanese translations thanks to @CheesersY5
• Croatian translations thanks to @milotype

Thanks to all users who contributed to this release!

~ Bottles’ Developers

Download 2021.11.28