Release Day 2022.4.14

It’s Release Day again!

Two more weeks of work have been done and it’s time to celebrate another release day!

Despite the short changelog (caused by the preparations for the Linux App Summit 2022 in which we will participate with a talk dedicated to Bottles), there are many news and new features!

News

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

Loading screen

Bottles performs several important operations at startup and these can take a few seconds. For this reason (and after many reports), we have tried to improve the times where possible and implemented a loading screen to avoid the feeling that things get stuck.

The UI is rendered insensitive until the process is finished (usually a few seconds).

Library mode

With this release we are also introducing a new experimental feature, still in early development. This is the library mode, which is a screen where you can gather multiple programs from your bottles and launch them with a simple click.

As for the program list, each program can be started and stopped from the dedicated button. To add new entries to this screen, just activate the experiment from the software preferences and then go to the programs list and from its context menu click on “Add to my library”.

Each entry shows the name of the bottle it comes from. In the future this library will be filled with more features, such as the usage time of a program, covers etc.

The “Kill all processes” button

We think it’s important to spend a few lines on this change. With this release the “Kill all processes” button has been moved to the bottle uptime menu:

this for consistency reasons (since restart and shutdown were already there) but also for security. In fact, showing users this much in the first position, could make them think of a safe action. Terminating running processes (especially via WINE) is absolutely not a safe process, it can cause memory and data losses and irreparably compromise files.

For this reason we have also added a confirmation dialog before proceeding with the operation:

VKBasalt

vkBasalt is a Vulkan post processing layer to enhance the visual graphics of games, and it is now available in Bottles.

If this is installed in the system, you can activate and deactivate it in Bottles via the dedicated toggle in the bottle preferences:

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.

• The importer can find and import the default .wine prefix too
• New experimental Library mode feature is now available
• New Loading screen for startup
• New option to restore hidden programs
• The Versioning manager preserve symlinks
• Working directory is now automatically set to the executable parent directory for manual launch
• The experimental Steam Proton Prefixes now supports third-party libraries
• The Direct3D renderer mode can now be changed from the bottle’s preferences
• The “Kill all” button now show a confirmation dialog
• The DXVK version selection was removed when creating a custom bottle
• DLL Components and Runners can be removed from Bottles’ preferences
• Support for obs-vkcapture
• Support for VKBasalt
• Fixed a bug with runner updates
• Fixed a bug with initial components check
• Fixed some missing translations
• Fixed a bug with bottle creation during dependencies installation
• Fixed a bug with gnome-terminal, spaces was not escaped
• Fixed a bug with DLL components installation, was causing a crash on missing DLLs
• Fixed a bug during Steam Proton prefixes update, was failing on missing launch options
• Kurdish (Central) translations thanks to @petrichor-494
• Turkish translations thanks to jose.gonzalez. 2007, @ersen0
• Chinese (Simplified) translations thanks to Eric
• French translations thanks to @julroy67

Thanks to all users who contributed to this release!

~ Bottles’ developers

Download 2022.4.14