Release day 2021.10.28

Another great day, when come release day!

In the past few weeks we have worked hard, focusing on three main objectives: stability, compatibility and community!

This is one of the most important release of… ok I often say this but I am always excited for this day 😅.

News

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

Notifications

With this release we have started using an internal notifications system, with which we can notify you of updates, tricks and much more! A simple and not at all invasive method of staying close to our community which is growing more and more and very quickly. Thanks 🙏!

Bottles Notifications

After reading a notification, you can delete it so that it never comes back.

There are multiple notifications types, which are:

per release (so it will be displayed only to users with the same release)
scheduled
on first launch

So after this update, the next time you open the app, you will see a new notification. Let us know what you think about this feature in our GitHub repository!

”Sandbox” for everyone

In the previus version we have expanded the sandbox for Flatpak users, also bringing the userdir of the prefixes inside the bottle, thus eliminating the symlinks to the user’s homedir.

Now on request we have also brought this functionality to all other non-Flatpak users. Now it is in fact possible to enable the sandbox directly to the creation of the bottle (for now only with the Custom environment).

Bottles Sandbox for everyone

To be clear, this isn’t a true sandbox. This is not to link the prefix userdir to the system user’s homedir, so the files will be saved in the prefix itself. We currently offer a true sandbox only to Flatpak users and we highly recommend everyone to use this format if they want a full-sandbox experience.

Better performance

We have also improved the general performance of Bottles, rewriting how components are handled and displayed in the UI. There are also a large number of bugfixes and improvements on async operations and http requests, these are now cached on first call, so you don’t have to wait for them to be loaded again next time. We think you will notice these improvements.

New components and installers

We have also updated our official Vaniglia runner to the 6.20 version, a very important version that brings many improvements, a special thanks to the Wine team for their great work.

There are also new installers for the following programs:

GOG Galaxy
Origin

Installers are still in development, so please be patient and test at your own risk.

Installers

Continuing to talk about installers, there is also something new on this front. Now it is possible to read the review of an installer directly from Bottles!

Reviews

Because each of our installers are tested and reviewed by the maintainer who has to answer a simple but detailed questionnaire. This is saved as a review, so that the user can know for sure what experience they will have once they have installed a program with one of our installers.

See here the installers guidelines for more information.

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.

Support for AMD FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution)
Now there is an internal Notifications manager, so we can keep in touch with the community!
Implement DataManager to store and manage internal data
Migrate components to the new ComponentEntry widget
Dependencies catalog is now sorted alphabetically
Now it is possible to read the installer review
Now all HTTP requests are cached after the first time
Support for QTerminal and LXTerminal
Allow also other packages to use the sandboxed userdir in bottles (currenty thi is not a full sandbox, just the userdir is not linked to the homedir)
General UI Cleanups (thanks to @BrainBlasted)
Fixed a regression in Wayland support
Fixed a bug in environment variables storing
Fixed the wrong dxvk_nvapi flag in bottle configuration
Fixed a bug with Proton component installation
Fixed a bug that was causing the Versioning system executing methods in the main thread in a non safe way
Fixed “Directory not empty” bug on bottle deletion
Fixed “‘bool’ object is not callable” bug on component installation failure
Fixed mispelling in translations (thanks to @Martinligabue, @comradekingu)
Finnish translations thanks to Jiri Grönroos
Hindi translations thanks to @ExistingProgrammer, @gauthamkrishna9991
Croatian translations thanks to @milotype
Japanese translations thanks to @jatin-cbs
Portuguese (Brazil) translations thanks to @davipatricio