Mikeserv Support Forum

For more than a year, Bottles has been supplied mainly as a Flatpak, giving us the flexibility and freedom to proceed with development. This, unfortunately, does not translate with distribution packages. As a result, users may get a subpar experience with Bottles when provided unofficially, and may also get a bad impression. Furthermore, this increases open issues in our issue tracker and support channels on chat services we use. This also duplicates our work in the support aspect. Typically, our solution is to ask users to use Flatpak instead, because the switch usually fixes many of those problems, but this has become more and more tiring for us. We actively test the Bottles Flatpak to provide a complete and excellent experience to the user. This makes troubleshooting a lot easier because Flatpak gives the luxury of having a separation between the application and the host, with very little dependencies needed on the host’s side. With that in mind, we can abstract almost any distribution specific problems.

We respectfully ask packagers to not package Bottles anymore. One of our priorities is to provide an excellent experience to the user. We do not want to resort to an approach that notifies the user that they are using an unofficial package. This would create distractions to users and will likely give them a horrible experience with Bottles.

It's been 2 years, yet we've seen several cases of distributions fucking up Bottles one way or another, so it's best to protect future users by exiting on non-sandboxed environments.