Release Day 2022.11.14: Interface Overhaul

It’s Release Day again!

A lot of work has been done this time around and it’s time to celebrate another release day!

This release comes with a major redesign of bottle details and a reorganization of settings UI.

News

Alright, let’s get to the point. What’s new in this version?

Change of the release schedule

We are changing our release schedule from bi-weekly to monthly. We will release each update on the 14th of each month. We used to devote all our time to Bottles, but recently we have started to develop our own projects, like Vanilla OS, Crystal Linux, Atoms, Upscaler and others. In the meantime, we also contributed to other free and open source projects.

Even with the schedule changes, we will continue to develop Bottles, fix bugs and improve the UX. At the same time, we will have more time to polish between updates, as we did especially with this update.

Brand new details view

The details view has been completely redesigned to improve the user friendliness of Bottles. The sidebar has been removed and the pages have been moved into the details view itself.

The option to run an executable is now much more visually prevalent to bring it into the focus and launch options are now neatly placed in their own dropdown next to it. Options to add and install programs have been moved after the programs list.

Redesigned settings

Settings page has also received an overhaul, similar settings have been rearranged into groups, making it easier to navigate through them.

QoL Changes

A lot of quality of life improvements have been made to Bottles to improve usability. “States” have been renamed to “Snapshots”, several dialogs have been rephrased, “Documentation” has been renamed to “Help”, mnemonics were added, along with a few more improvements that bring Bottles closer to GNOME Human Interface Guidelines.

Check #2228 for full details.

Removal of vkBasalt’s Color Lookup Table feature

We decided to remove the color lookup table feature from the vkBasalt dialog. We realized that supporting color lookup tables is a really complicated task, and it’s a topic we know very little about. We aren’t sure if it’s working correctly or not. We rather remove this feature than provide a potential broken feature. We apologize for users who have been using this feature, but if you understand how vkBasalt’s color lookup table works, please don’t hesitate to contact us!

Components installation queue

The component manager now uses a queue for installations. This means that by requiring the installation of multiple components, they will be queued and installed in sequence rather than simultaneously. This choice was made to prevent a large use of resources between the connection and the CPU (for the decompression of the archives).

PulseAudio latency disabled by default

Since the previous release, the PulseAudio latency option was deprecated and enabled by default. This update disables the PulseAudio latency option by default, as enabling it would cause the audio to crackle or have unintended behavior. It will be up to the user to enable it from the environment variables section if necessary.

All other changes

There are many other changes and improvements in this release. Below are some noteworthy ones, for all others, please refer to the GitHub organization.

• Bottle details automatically show on bottle creation
• Bottles now complies with GNOME Circle guidelines, see #2126
• Disable pulseaudio_latency by default.
• Fixed a crash during startup due to uninstaller.
• Implemented a queue for installing components.
• Fixed bottle deletion not working sometimes.
• Support for latest dxvk @Blisto91
• Fix for DLSS
• Added tooltips for program grades
• Fix installer completion @jntesteves
• Fix gamescope arguments @jntesteves
• Added Ctrl + W shortcut for closing windows @A6GibKm
• Fixed bottles unsetting XDG_DATA_HOME
• French translations thanks to @julroy and @tymmsyde
• Turkish translations thanks to @54linux-ea and @ruizlenato
• Russian translations thanks to @lenemter and @Smoque
• Catalan translations thanks to @rogervc
• Arabic tran*slations thanks to @TheDarkEvil
• Korean translations thanks to @MarongHappy
• Protuguese translations thanks to @davipatricio, @SantosSi and @vitorhcl
• Galician translations thanks to @NicoSGF64
• Hebrew translations thanks to @itayweb
• Polish translations thanks to @Mikutut