Release day 2021.9.14

It’s Release Day again!

In this release we worked on the second part of the Bottles code remake, improving performance and fixing a number of bugs, making Bottles even more stable.

Under the hood most of the code has been rewritten and / or improved to fix a series of anomalous crashes found in previous versions. To the delight of developers, this release brings a number of improvements and documentations to the code, making it easy to understand.

News

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

While this is a release with updates mostly under the hood, there are some easily noticeable new features.

Replace fonts

The dependency manager now supports the replace_fonts action, this can be used when installing a dependency, to replace one font with another.

- action: replace_font
  font: Source Han Sans SC
  replace: 
    - Dengxian
    - FangSong
    - KaiTi
    - Microsoft YaHei
    - Microsoft YaHei UI
    - NSimSun
    - SimHei
    - SimKai
    - SimSun
    - SimSun-ExtB

It is a replace in the bottle register, making it appear that a font is installed, offering one with its name. This can be used to install fonts that cannot normally be redistributed or are incompatible for some reason. There is already an implementation of this new action in cjkfonts which will be published in the next few days (the time for the release to reach most users).

Download manager

The new download manager brings many improvements and bugfixes, as well as a new, much more intuitive design. In fact, ours was never just a download manager, as it also tracks other operations such as creating a new restore point or extracting components.

New Download Manager

Progress bars have been removed making room for a spinner that indicates operations are in progress. When a download is in progress, it will increase its percentage to the right, giving you a clear idea of the download status. The icon in the headerbar has also been removed, in its place we have put a spinner which clearly indicates that there are operations in progress.

It also fix a series of crashes caused by accessing some components through an unsafe thread.

Splitted dependencies

The dependencies list is getting bigger and bigger, so we have decided to organize these in a different way. The installed ones are now places on bottom of the list, and the available ones on top. So you can see what you have installed, just scrolling to the bottom.

We also fixed a bug that didn’t show the “remove” button in some dependencies, even if they have the uninstaller.

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.

Now Bottles manage some failures on components download
Fixed a bug of the main manager, could not find the component manager
Fixed a bug that caused Bottles to run on xwayland instead of wayland
Fixed a bug in checking for special characters in the bottle name that allowed the use of single quotes
Fixed a bug that caused a “no such file or directory” when deleting a bottle
Fixed a bug in bottle renaming (I didn’t really fully understand the problem but we know it has been fixed)
Fixed a bug that prevented the use of Wine command line trouhg the system terminal
Fixed a bug in the dependencies manager that was not able to create new directories in some cases
Fixed a bug in backup manager that was using wrong directories for export
Fixed a bug that was causing Bottles’ window to not display the icon
Fixed a bug in toggling virtual desktop mode
Esperanto translations thanks to @phlostically, @phlostically
Hungarian translations thanks to @zoli111, @ovari
Portuguese translations thanks to @SantosSi
Spanish translations thanks to @fitjob, @oscfdezdz
Finnish translations thanks to Jiri Grönroos
French translations thanks to @julroy67
Chinese (Simplified) translations thanks to @sr093906
Croatian translations thanks to @milotype
Turkish translations thanks to @ersen0