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by horsawlarway 312 days ago
It's an easy way to spin up wine prefixes, and it also installs known working environments for many applications.

In that sense - it's actually incredibly similar to docker/snap. It's isolating the application with all the needed dependencies in it's own prefix, with a nice user experience on top.

It also distributes a large number of things: https://usebottles.com/database
1 comments
ChocolateGod 311 days ago
It's not distributing software, it's distributing config files to setup a prefix.

A prefix is no more isolated than a folder and setting an env variable to control library lookup location.

This is in stark contrast to docker/snap which distribute actual software packages and use name spacing for isolation.

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horsawlarway 310 days ago
What point do you think you're making here?

A prefix isolates a wine install. Bottles intentionally pushes users into a "one per application" strategy with Wine prefixes, isolating the wine install and deps for that application from other applications. Generally a great strategy for using Wine, even if you'd prefer to do it yourself.

And Bottles is a much more convenient wrapper compared to doing that manually and managing them yourself (which I've also done).

Bottles also distributes the instructions to configure a "generally working" prefix for a large number of desired applications.

If we go back to the docker analogy - they're giving you the Dockerfile, not the image. I'm not actually convinced that's such a "stark" contrast. If anything, it's semantic peanuts (and mostly for legal reasons given the popular applications tend to be copyright protected games, rather than OSS software which makes up most docker images).

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