 One of the biggest hurdles of Windows users switching over to Linux is familiarity of their programs. So they've used their Windows-only programs that don't have a Linux version. Some of these programs they've used for years, they've become dependent on these programs and then they switch over to Linux, that program is not available. What do you do? Well, if your machine is a beefy enough machine, what I've always suggested is virtual machines. Use a virtual machine of Windows 10 or Windows 11 to run your Windows programs, because your virtual machines are going to work, right? The virtual machine is basically Windows, it's 100% Windows, so running Windows software in a Windows virtual machine is guaranteed to work. There are other options though, if a virtual machine is not an option for you, there are kind of workarounds on Linux. We have a program called Wine, which is sort of a Windows emulator, although technically it stands for wine is not an emulator, that's actually what the acronym stands for, but it kind of is an emulator. And wine for the most part works, it works for most of the software out there, not everything. You will find some programs that don't work at all in wine, some Windows programs, they just won't work with wine. Many of them work flawlessly. Some of them work better in wine than they do on native Windows. Then you've got a middle ground, some have little niggles, right? Some of them mostly work, but some of the functionality is broken. So wine is an option that I did want to talk about briefly today, because I came across this really neat program that I wasn't familiar with called Bottles. And basically this is a front end to the wine program. If you go to the Bottles website at usebottles.com, you can see easily run Windows software on Linux with Bottles, and it is dead simple to use this piece of software. So scrolling through their web page here, you can see you've got a lot of configuration options. You can really tweak this Windows environment and turn on and off various functionality for those of you that need that kind of advanced features. One interesting thing is that there are a lot of game launchers that are installable programs in one click here inside Bottles. So you can quickly install the Epic Game Store, Ubisoft, Steam, Origin, EA Launcher, Good Ol' Games, and Blizzard's BattleNet. So that is actually really nice. And many people that use wine and proton these days, you know, the Windows software that really prevents people from switching to Linux these days, still gaming is a big deal. And that's really where wine and proton are focused these days is to make your gaming experience on Linux so great. So let's go ahead and install Bottles. The package that they suggest to install is the Flatpak. So that's what I'm going to do. Flatpak has some security features that make it rather interesting for an application like Wine or in this case Bottles. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab the name of Bottles. So the last part of the URL, com.usebottles.bottles, that's the actual program name. So I'm going to grab that. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to a new workspace here. And let me open up a terminal and let's zoom way in. And I'm going to do a Flatpak install FlatHub and then com.usebottles.bottles. That's a very convoluted way of installing a program, but that's the way you would have to do it. The installation process usually takes like 30 seconds a minute. I've already got it installed. So I get the message of skipping the installation process because I've already got it. Now that I've already got it to run it. And I would do Flatpak run the name of the program, which again is com.usebottles.bottles. Then it'll take a second and there is that application. Let me move my terminal out of the way and I'll make this floating here. And you can see in the screen here Bottles start off by creating a bottle. So let's create a new bottle. So you have various environments. You could set up a gaming environment. So this is going to set up everything with the correct settings for most games. Then you have applications. So this would be like your office applications, text editors, things like that. You have a custom environment where you could go and choose various custom options for setting up this particular wine bottle. I'm going to choose the application environment because I've downloaded two different Windows executables to install and try out here inside Bottles. So the first one I downloaded Notepad++, which is actually free and open source software. It's licensed under the GPO, but it is only available on Windows. They actually don't make a Linux version. So I'm going to install this Windows only program here inside Linux using Bottles. So I'm going to create, says creating bottle. Now the very first time you create a bottle, it's going to take a while because it's going to have to install a lot of stuff, a lot of dependencies that are required. Now mine went rather quickly because I had installed bottles before and ran through this installation process. But the very first bottle you create, don't be surprised if it takes like five minutes to set up. So go grab a cup of coffee or something. It'll actually warn you that it's going to take a while. But after that, every new bottle you create, typically it'll create them in 30 seconds or less. So let me close that window. And now we've got Notepad++ here. We've got this application button here. If you click on it, you will go to this page here, you get run executable here. And what you want to do is click on that and then go find the Windows executable, basically the installer for Notepad++, right? And once you click on that, it's going to start the installer for Notepad++. I'll hit OK on English for the language. Then next, I'm just going to agree to everything. I'll just go with all the defaults, install and then tick on run Notepad. So I want it to run when I finish. So click finish. And there is Notepad++. So very cool. Text editor. We've got the change log by default that pops up on first run. I don't know too much about Notepad++. I do know that a Linux program called NotepadQQ, it kind of mimics a lot of the functionality in Notepad++, but I'm not going to do any kind of text editing or test it out to see how well Notepad++ runs here. But it did successfully install. Let me exit back out of this screen. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to that screen. I'll click on application. And now you will notice I have programs, Notepad++. So no longer do we need to run the executable, which would just reinstall the program, right? We don't want to run through that. Now we just want to click this button, which should launch the program in its current state, which is of course how we left it. So that is very cool. You've got some other options here. The trash can, of course, is destroying this particular wine bottle. You have this downward arrow where you can make a backup. You can duplicate the bottle and you can make a backup copy, a full archive. You've got this X here, which just kills a running process. You've got a different downward arrow here for reboot and shutdown, I guess, of the Windows environment as well. So that was really, really easy. I'm going to create one more wine bottle just to prove how easy this is. This time I'm going to choose the plus symbol here and choose another application. I don't really have any games to install. Most Windows only games these days. If you're installing them through wine and proton, you're probably using a game launcher such as Steam anyway. But I was installing a couple of programs I've heard people mention before that they wish were available on Linux. One of them is Notepad++. Another one is IrfanView. I don't know too much about this particular application, but I've had a few people in the past mention it. So I went and found a Windows executable for this particular program. I think it's a photo manager or maybe even a photo editor. And we created that bottle. So now I'm going to go to the IrfanView. That's a weird name. IrfanView may go find the installer. There is the executable and it launches on its own. And then I click next and next. I'm just going to go with all the defaults again. I don't know anything about this particular program. Click done. And now that I've clicked done, make that floating. Yeah, some kind of image viewer image organizer. If I clicked on the little folder here, we could open some data. One thing I did want to mention with both Notepad++, I forgot to do this, but I'm glad I did it in IrfanView is you don't have access to the rest of your data by default, right? It's sandboxed into this Windows environment. So I can't go and grab any of my files on my Linux file system. You can when you want to, but by default, that's not the way this works. And that's one of the benefits of Flatpaks is for security reasons. You know, some of these programs that you're trying to install, you go grab random Windows executables and try to run them in wine on your Linux system, you know, they could be malicious. They could be dangerous. I don't play with wine too much. I do know of obviously the C drive. It's kind of like your virtual Windows file system, right? And but you do have a Z drive, which is unusual on a Windows system. The Z drive is a Linux file system. You can see you've got Ben at C home, et cetera. Although this is not your home, right? This is if I go into home, I've got DT, but if I go into home DT, there's nothing here. So there are workarounds. There are ways that you could allow access to your local files in these wine containers in these bottles. I am not exactly sure how to do that. It's again, it's not something I've ever tried to do. I've never actually been a wine user. But if I go back into bottles here, this particular page for Irfan view, we can actually go into wine config. So let me click on that. And then we get, OK, we get our proper wine settings here where we've got drives. Of course, in drives, we could add more drives in our Windows environment. If we wanted, if I go to desktop integration, that we can change some of the theming. And we do have the ability to do some folder stuff here. See desktop documents, pictures, music, downloads, templates. These are all folders in my home directory. And I'm assuming, for example, if I wanted to link, you know, to a certain directory on the file system, yeah, so select the Unix target, please. So yeah, I could connect some of this to my local file system, to some of these VM file systems, if you will. And even though these are not really virtual machines. So I'm not going to do anything with the config, though, because I'm actually just going to blow away these bottles. These were just for demonstration purposes, other than the wine config. You could actually click on this and browse the virtual C drive here. Not sure where that opened up. Did it open up behind that? Or maybe I just didn't click on it. I see. I've got my file manager already opened on another screen. Let me move my file manager over here. So you guys can actually see what happened. I had my file manager open and it actually opened drive underscore C. You can see the full path to where that C drive actually is. So that actually works as well. You also have your registry editor, debugging information, task manager. And you have the windows control panel, some of the other more advanced stuff. You can get into preferences here and tick on and off certain various functionality for your windows environment. I'm not going to play with any of that stuff. I'm just going to go with the default settings for everything and also list all the dependencies that are installed as part of this bottles program. So that is bottles. Really cool. Wine is pretty easy to work with anyway. Bottles just makes it that much easier by having everything set up for you in this flat pack package. It installs Proton and DXVK and a million other things, fonts and various windows libraries, and you're all set up, right? It makes the process of installing this stuff a lot easier than it was when I first got into Linux. When I first got into desktop Linux about 15 years ago, wine was around then and I didn't like it because it was hard. It was complicated. It was difficult to use. Most of the time I would try these windows programs in wine. They just wouldn't install at all or they'd install, but you go to launch it, they wouldn't launch it all or, you know, it was just a headache. But things have improved so much. I mean, wine and Proton, they are at the heart of everything as far as steam on Linux, right? The gaming experience, the fact that we have thousands of games on Linux now that weren't available on Linux five years ago, that's all because of wine. Wine made that happen, right? Well, people that work on wine made that happen. Wine, of course, is going to be at the heart of the Steam Deck, the new handheld device for steam. And I think that's fantastic. It's one of the shining examples of free and open source software that's really good and that actually makes a difference and not just makes a difference, but actually brings people to Linux because I know that these people that have to use certain windows only software, I know it's a headache. And wine just gives them another option. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Devin, Gabe, James, Matt, Michael, Mitchell, Paul, Scott, Wes, Alan, Armoredragon, Chuck, Commander, Ingrid, Diochai, Dylan, George, Lee, Linux, Ninja, Maxim, Mike, Erion, Alexander, Peace, Arch, and Fedor. Polytech, Red Prophet, Steven, Willie, these guys. They're my high steered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This episode you just watched would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors, it's just me and you guys, the community. If you like my work and you want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace. I tried to install Win out, but couldn't get it to work.