 So as a die hard Linux user, I can't even really remember the last time I thought in my brain. Man, I really need a Windows program. Like it's been a really, really long time since I've needed anything that runs only on Windows. When I switched to Linux, I did my best to find alternatives to all the things that I used to use on Windows. And I've been very successful at that. I've moved from Photoshop to GIMP. I've moved from Premiere to Kaden Live. All these things I've found alternatives for on Linux and just have really never looked back. Now, the thing is, is that's me. I'm very dedicated to Linux and using only open source stuff when I can. And really kind of abandoning anything that has to do with Windows because, well, I don't like Windows. But not everybody can abandon Windows software so easily. It's one of the reasons why when a lot of people switch to Linux, they keep their Windows partition around and dual boot for a very long time because a lot of people need software that runs only on Windows. Now, the great news is that over the years, running Windows software on Linux has gotten progressively easier and easier. So today, we're going to be taking a look at a tool that does just that. And it's called Bottles. Now Bottles has been around for a while now and several people have asked me to take a look at it, but I've resisted mostly because of that aforementioned disinterest in Windows software. Like, I have no real interest in any Windows software. But recently, I've been getting back into gaming because, well, I bought a Steam Deck and I decided I wanted to play Hearthstone. Now, Hearthstone is a battle.net game and it only runs on Windows. Now, I have in the past run Hearthstone on Linux. I can do it through Play on Linux. I tried it on Lutris and both did fairly well, although the install process was overly complicated, mostly because of font dependencies, believe it or not. But you could do it and it was not really truly all that hard. Actually, one of the first videos that I ever made on this channel was how to install Hearthstone on Linux. So that brings back memories. Bottles made it really super easy to install Hearthstone on Linux and I had no problems whatsoever. Now, obviously it goes beyond gaming because there are several other categories of software out there that you could want to install that happen to just run on Windows. So Bottles enables you to do that almost flawlessly. Now, there are problems and issues as you'll see today, but those are expected and a lot of times you can work around them. So let me go ahead and show you what Bottles looks like and how it works. So this right here is Bottles and first we should talk about installation of Bottles itself. And you can get this through a lot of distros repositories, but the recommended way of getting this is through Flatpak. And that's the way that I did it. If you use like Fedora, it's about the only way to get it to be honest with you because the Fedora version in the repository is significantly out of date and doesn't actually run. So if you want to install Bottles, Flatpak is probably the best way to go. Now, once you have it installed, the setup of it is very easy. It's literally one step. It pops up a like welcome screen. It tells you a little bit about Bottles and then it says finished installation. You hit the button. It installs whatever needs to install. And then you're presented with a screen that looks like this, obviously without the existing Bottles. Now, first, let's talk about creating a bottle. So you hit the plus button up here. You name the bottle. So we're going to call this battle.net or I'm going to call it battle to and then you select the environment that you want to use for your bottle. Now, the reason why there are options here is because gaming and applications have two different sets of things that are included in the bottle. So gaming is more or has more dependencies aimed towards games, whereas the application will have more dependencies based on the application. And obviously that will exclude the dependencies usually needed for games. So if your video editor or whatever that you're trying to install doesn't need the gaming stuff, you should select the application environment instead of the gaming one. So we're just going to do the gaming one because we're going to install a game. We'll go ahead and create. It's going to take maybe a minute or so to set it up. It won't take too long and it's done. It will take you to the bottle page. Now here's where you have a lot of options. So if you have an executable for Windows, you can actually run that from here and then install it just like normal. Or they have several different preconfigured installers for you and they're all rated based on how well they work. So things like Ableton Live is here. Blizzard.net, which is what we'll install here in a second. The EA Launcher Enlisted Epic Games Store FL Studio and just so many more. GOG Galaxy Origin, even though I don't think they really use that anymore. Specific games. Steam is here. Although why you'd want to install the Windows version of Steam? I'm not exactly sure, but it is possible if you want to. And then Ubisoft Connect is here as well. So there are several installers that are preconfigured for you. And these work the best out of all of the things that I've tried because they're meant to be here. And they've kind of been preconfigured to run well. So I'm actually just going because I've already already have the battle on that, even though I called the battle battle. We'll go ahead and install the EA Launcher and then get started. It will do the thing that it needs to do. And how long the installation takes really does depend on what installer you're using or what you're installing, I should say. So sometimes it could take upwards of 20 minutes because it's doing a whole bunch of stuff. It's all a whole bunch of dependencies. Sometimes it's super quick. So it really does depend. So eventually you'll get to a screen that looks like this or some variation of it depending on what installer you're actually using. And then you will just install the software just like you would on Windows. So we'll hit let's go. It will do random things in the background without telling you exactly what it's doing. And then it's done so you can see it will launch right into the EA installer. And you can move around just like a regular window. You can pin it to your taskbar just like a regular window. And it works very well. Now it's taking a little while to load here. I'm assuming sometimes you'll see that it loads like a blank screen and you have to like right click on. Anywhere in the window to get things to show up. And then you can just sign in like normal download any games that are inside of the installer just like normal and it should work. Now obviously this is not going to be 100%. So if you get to a point where it just doesn't work, you know, there are no guarantees in any of this stuff just like there never has been when it comes to wine and stuff like that. But bottles has been the most consistent windows based emulation layer or whatever it is that I've ever used. Now it does use wine in the background. So the technology here is not new. It uses wine and several other containerized technologies and stuff that I'll never understand to basically be magic and run windows games and applications just like you were on windows. It's amazing. Now I'm going to go ahead and close this and show you a little bit more around what we just installed. And then we're going to install a bottle for a program that doesn't have its own installer inside of bottles. So on this page here, you'll see three different programs to run and you don't have to run all of them. You can run whatever that you want. Some applications require that all their services be running. Some of them don't. It really does depend on what you've installed. But this is where you'd come back to if you wanted to run a launcher again. So you just hit play and it will actually launch that screen that we just saw again or it should. And it does. It just takes a little bit and then you can continue on doing whatever it was that you were doing before and just carry on. Now below that you'll see options and for applications that you installed with a pre-configured launcher using the install programs option. You can pretty much ignore these things other than the snapshots and stuff. If you wanted to back up your bottle, you could do so from either the three dot menu up here for full backup or you can create snapshots. You can look at the task manager and all that stuff. But for the most part, the options here. But for the most part, the options here on pre-configured installers that they have in bottles already, you can just ignore. Now that's not the case if you're going to install something that doesn't have a pre-configured installer. So let's go ahead and try that. So first we're going to try iTunes. Now I know that this is going to be crazy. No one in their right mind would want to run iTunes on Linux, but you can foreseeably do it and I have done it. So we're going to create a bottle. We're going to call it iTunes. Just like so. I'm going to hit the applications environment, hit create. It's going to do its thing again. It won't take very long. And then I'm going to hit close. And now we're in our iTunes bottle. And here's where we do something different. So we can hit run executable now. The thing about this is, is that for whatever reason, the .exe's are not showing up in the file picker. I don't know why they should show up there, but they don't. But so what I'm just going to do is type in the name of the .exe package that I downloaded. I know that it's there and that it will work. We're going to hit run and it's going to run the iTunes executable thing. And as you can see, it brings up the wizard. It looks just like it did back in 2001. You know, it hasn't changed all that much, but it, you know, whatever you can hit install. You can leave those things if you want to leave them. It doesn't really matter. We'll hit install again. We'll hit yes here. Why not? And then it will install iTunes. It'll actually do so very, very quickly. Now as you'll see when this comes up, it doesn't install iTunes very well. We're going to see here if it will auto launch it. It didn't before, but that's okay. We'll just hit play here and we'll see what it comes up looking like. Now the last time it was just a pure black screen and you could barely make out any of the user interface. And yeah, that's basically what we're going to get this time. I think eventually it does show up. No, I don't want you to set the default player. And then there's supposedly a button here somewhere. But anyways, as you can see, technically we've installed iTunes. Now this is not usable for obvious reasons, but it's foreseeable that you could get this running properly. And the reason or way you would do that, we'll go ahead and close this. It won't close or we'll wait for that to catch up for whatever reason. Window not responding. It's a Windows program. What do you expect? But anyways, it's foreseeable that you could get that to work properly by going down here and messing around with the settings and dependencies. So if you hit the dependencies thing here, now you'd probably want to do this before you install this. So there's a good chance that if I were to try to troubleshoot this, I'd want to go back and remake the bottle, select the dependencies before I ran the executable. But for my purposes, I can just show you this page here and they have a ton of different dependencies here that you can try in order to get things to work. Now you'd probably want to Google what dependencies you need. Now chances are you probably won't find that information on iTunes because I have no clue if there's any than anybody ever who's wanted to run iTunes on Linux. But if there were chances are they will have gone through the process of finding out which dependencies here you'll need to make it work and look properly. Now another thing that you have to keep in mind specifically with things like iTunes is that it does not have access by default to your user files. So if you want to have actually like use iTunes to access your music library, you could possibly do that, but you'd have to exit sandbox mode in order to do it. So that's another thing that you'd have to keep in mind. But when it comes to things like this, where you get to a point where you've installed a bottle that doesn't quite work the way you expect it to. Chances are that's going to be a dependency problem. And then you'll have to go into the dependencies thing and install the things that you need. You may need to install. Now, like I said, the best way to figure out what those things are is probably a Google search because someone else will have gone through and determine which dependencies you need. Another thing that you can mess around with if you are having problems are the settings of the bottle. So you can choose between how the direct 3D and stuff like that are set. You can choose between having DX VK enabled or disabled. You can choose between different versions of soda or the runner, I should say you can choose between a whole bunch of different ways of having the thing that you install display and run through this Greek graphics and different types of rendering software and things like that. So so like I said, if you are having some issues on things that you're trying to install outside of those preconfigured installers, chances are in the settings. And the dependencies is going to be where you want to look to see if you can rectify the problem. Now, I chose a really weird one, right? Because no one in the right mind, like I said, is going to try to install iTunes. And that's probably for good reasons, probably the reason why, you know, it's having so many problems. Now you can kill the bottle just by hitting the stop button and that will kill anything even if it has, you know, frozen. So you just hit the stop button and it will stop. You can delete a bottle by going to the three dot button up here and hitting delete. You can also back up from here, duplicate the bottle browser files basically would have you install another executable. If you wanted to do that, you could show hidden files. There's some troubleshooting steps as well. So we'll go ahead and delete and get rid of iTunes because we'll never need that again. So that is a very brief look at bottles. Now there are a couple of other things that you can do if you have a bottle that you know works really, really well. You can hit add shortcuts and it will actually add it to a library page where you can just launch this. Now I have battle not up and running. So I'm going to go ahead and launch that so you can see that it works really, really well. So it doesn't take very long. And it just launches battle.net just like you'd expect on Windows. And it does take a little bit while a little while to actually launch. But once you actually get into your gameplay, it seems to work fairly well. Now, to be honest with you, I've only tried Hearthstone so I don't know how the more graphics intensive things actually work. But Hearthstone work wonderfully like super, super good. It does do an update every time you open up the or the battle.net application. So that does take a little while, but it does seem to work very well. Now I'm actually going to wait for that and I'll cut away and then come back and I'll show you how Hearthstone actually works. Okay, now that that update is done, I'm going to go ahead and play here. And we'll show you what Hearthstone or at least how Hearthstone actually works for it fairly well. So I'm not going to sit here and play a game for you. You don't have to sit through that because I'm really bad at it because I haven't played in forever. But as you can see, Hearthstone works really well. And like I said, this is not the most graphically intensive game, but it is a Windows only game running outside of Steam very, very well. All the modes work, online play works, and it's just really, really good. If you're into the battle.net stuff, if you have old EA games that are only available in the EA launcher, using bottles gives you a way to play those games. And if you have Windows software outside of games that you need to run, bottles gives you another option to at least try to get those things up and running. Things like Ableton Live, things like several different other DAWs that are available. Some of those even have pre-configured launchers that you can use to get set up. Now the one area where this falls down and it's unfortunate is with Adobe products. So as far as I'm aware, there is no way to get Creative Cloud actually running on this. And that is like I said, that's a downside. It's not really their fault. Obviously Adobe is just the devil and doesn't like to have anything running on Linux. But if they could get Creative Cloud running in bottles, and maybe they've made some inroads since the last time I tried, I don't know. But if they could, that'd be a game changer because the Adobe suite is by far the one piece of software, especially nowadays that people want to run but can't when it comes to switching to Linux. It used to be gaming in Adobe. Now gaming is there. The Adobe stuff is still not here. And that's unfortunate. If bottles could bridge that gap, that'd be awesome. But as far as I know, the Adobe stuff just doesn't work. So that's bottles. And it is an amazing piece of software. Now, like I said, it just runs on existing software and kind of combines things together to get things to run kind of magically in some cases. So it's not like they're breaking the mold over anything that hasn't done before, but it's done a very good job of putting a whole bunch of different technologies together, like wine and wine tools and containerization technologies to get Windows programs running on Linux very, very well. Now, like you saw in the video, it's not 100% all the time, but it brings you so much closer than we ever have been before. And that is really cool. So if you have thoughts on bottles, you can leave those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on Mass of Donor Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash the Linux cast. Links for Liberapay and YouTube will be in the video description. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube. You guys are all absolutely amazing. Without you, the channel just not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very, very much for your support. Truly, you guys are awesome. Thanks again. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time. Bye.