[hrvstr]

Interesting. The UI looks way better than Lutris and Heroic Launcher. Anyone tried all three of them and went with Bottles? I first tried Lutris and then switched to Heroic, but I am not too keen about Electron apps, although Heroic works quite well.

[wetbaby]

I've tried lutris and bottles and stuck with bottles.

My experience with getting battle.net on lutris was miserable. After staring at the UI trying to add battle.net I was informed to go to a site, pull back a script on there and I had no indication of what it was doing to my machine.

However, bottles ships with scripts to set it up for you. I created a bottle in the location I wanted, installed battle.net and logged in and it worked.

Its not without problems, if I accidentally start battle.net twice, my CPU utilisation shoots up to 100% and is stuck there until I kill the bogus bottles process.

There's also a problem of the battle.net bottle bricking itself completely (I have to move the game files out, delete all bottles configs and recreate the bottle) if I change the runner.

Whether these issues are bottles fault or not I can't say.

But concept of what a 'bottle' is is easy to understand. The configuration is very rich and works well. I pick a pick a directory, pick a runner, install what I want, enable mangohud and I'm golden.

[smackeyacky]

I won’t hear a bad word said about Heroic launcher. It’s almost literally magic. Up until I tried it I was still dual booting windows on my gaming laptop.

When they got GOG cloud saves to work with cyberpunk 2077 I sent them money.

[CodesInChaos]

I generally like heroic, but it often has annoying bugs which persist for several months.

[krs_]

I tend to use Bottles only for applications rather than games for some reason, but it works well for both. What I like about it for that use case is that it almost encourages adding multiple apps per bottle. This makes it quite easy to have one bottle for say all your dotnet apps etc.

[unfixed]

I tried those 3, and decided to go for bottles. The configuration needed in order to run Windows programms were really really easy, and I like the fact that I can keep all the Windows programs neatly organized in a single place, not only games (as Lutris and Heroic are intended to).

I also tried just wine, but Bottles is a handy wrapper.

[horsawlarway]

I've used all three that you've listed (plus several more).

I generally stick to Bottles whenever I can. It's a very general solution for running windows software on linux, with a nice UI.

I've used it for both gaming & non-gaming applications. Everything from running battle.net on my steam deck, to Alan Wake 2 on my desktop, to running specific Victron configuration software on my laptop for programming my solar inverters.

It's not perfect (occasionally recipes get out of date, and sometimes you still need to go get a specific version of Proton-GE, or download some of their dependencies manually, for example) but generally speaking... It's a pretty good interface.

Keeping all the configuration/dependencies alongside the individual apps is great.

It's much less "Game specific" than either Lutris or Heroic.

[close04]

I went with Heroic for everything gaming and I have not stumbled on anything better since.

I use Bottles for emulating general software.