Runners tab feedback

[Qronikarz]

People that spent some more time playing with Wine and it's forks can kind of understand what every component in Runners tab in Preferences does, but some of them are still confusing.

Soda is the default on fresh installs so that's not a problem if users visit this section, but then there are 6 named sections and one extra for all others. Sure, you can google it, but that doesn't help much for newcomers. Let's click on GE Wine - it shows wine-ge-proton why suddenly the GE swapped places? Does it mean anything? It could also benefit having the info link that could explain what it does differently. For example this post to explain the difference between Proton GE and Wine GE: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/uzrz2k/a_thread_about_using_protonge_and_winege_builds/

GE Wine and and Lutris don't have any description below them.

Valve's Wine basically means Proton right? Then in my opinion it should say based on Valve's Proton as it makes it even clearer distinction on what to expect. There may be people that only heard of Proton.

Currently the only 2 named runners that are based on Wine development branch (well... technically, since they weren't updated in a long time) - Vaniglia and Caffe (my personal favorite) have a description based on Wine's upstream. Which sounds correct, but when you google it, it doesn't show up anywhere. in WineHQ wiki it's written that there are 3 branches - stable, development and staging. Maybe change the based on Wine's upstream to based on Wine's development branch

All of the runners include staging patches so maybe it's not needed to say it in description as it doesn't make any difference?

When you expand other section it shows various kron4ek runners: staging, tkg, amd64, x86. Which one should users pick and when? Does picking the amd64 allow to run 32-bit software like the other runners do?

Speaking of, when you expand "GE Proton" you see multiple versions of ge-proton, then when you scroll enough you get Proton-xx-GE which is confusing, but then at the end you have kron4ek proton and does it belong there? Is it based on GE Proton?

Another good addition in my opinion would be to show update date of the runner so users can know when it was last updated: Soda-7.0-9 was released 2 weeks ago, but Vaniglia 7.18 was released nearly 5 months ago.

And one last thing. the Pre-Release button isn't very responsive. It takes visible amount of time to switch. Also it's not really used much - when was the last time there was any runner released as unstable? It also doesn't show if the runner is stable or unstable so you are never sure. The switch being unresponsive could be because there are too many runners. Maybe it would be a good idea to remove some of them from the list? It's good that there are older versions because you can check regressions, but do we need every old version to be available?

[jannuary]

This feels really rambly and ranty. I would agree that there is a need to tidy up the runners UX, including cutting some runners off; but this particular issue isn't exactly actionable.

[Qronikarz]

It's just a collection of some minor things I personally noticed in over 1 year of using Bottles, that could be improved when the time of redesigning the Runners and Components tabs comes. I have written it today because I had time today. It can be visited later.

[Perkolator]

MrQuerter has many good points here. It's far from a rant.

The docs.usebottles.com is horribly outdated (and some sections are still "Page under construction"), especially the runners section. I just recently started using Bottles and trying gaming in linux, and I have to say that the learning curve is rather steep, especially with the runners. I have googled about runners especially and read a ton of sites and information to get (now hopefully) a some kind of basic understanding of all of this.

And if the post by MrQuerter rattled you the wrong way, I fear that this next thing is going to drive you hopping mad (hopefully not!); while trying and learning to use Bottles, I have noticed on many occasion that there are sadly many bugs (I'm going to report them later) and one thing especially that I've found has made it harder to understand/learn all this, is that making changes to settings of a bottle seem to sometimes end the bottle "environment" in a random state, not what was selected from the settings.

E.g. just yesterday I tried this one game in a bottle with Lutris runner (I have not been able to run any game with the Soda runner so far.. :( ) where the game itself worked, except not playing cinematics (some "gstreamer" errors). I then tried few other runners (game cinematics worked with "wine-ge", but mangohud disappears when cinematics are shown, and alt-tabbing to desktop frozes the game & needed to force close) and changed few other settings, only to set all settings back to what they were previously and selecting the same Lutris runner again. Which ended so that the game doesn't even launch anymore. Same exact settings used! I have seen this happen many times already. Something seems to happen under the hood that doesn't work and the bottle environment ends up as not as set up from the GUI (I have one example of this, it's also an UI bug, gonna post it separately).

Another good addition in my opinion would be to show update date of the runner so users can know when it was last updated: Soda-7.0-9 was released 2 weeks ago, but Vaniglia 7.18 was released nearly 5 months ago.

Exactly what I was coming here to write about. This is the minimum what could be done to make the runner choices at least a bit more understandable.

Lutris, Vaniglia & Kron4ek have different kind of runners, some of them are "buried" in the list and users might think that the top of the list shows the latest version.

Also, if the old/deprecated stuff is not removed (Lutris? Caffe? others?), at least mark them as EndOfLife, or something similar.

---

QUESTION: In Bottles Preferences->Runners, the latest "Vaniglia" version offered is 7.18, but in https://github.com/bottlesdevs/wine/releases there's several newer versions available. Why aren't these offered through Bottles?

---

QUESTION: In Bottles Preferences->Runners, the "GE Proton" header mentions: "Requires the Steam Runtime turned on". Where is the "Steam Runtime" setting? Can't find it anywhere.

QUESTION: In Bottles Preferences->General->Integrations, is the "Steam Proton Prefixes" somehow related to "GE Proton" runner and/or to "Steam Runtime" setting(wherever that is)?

---

--removed a bug report from here, it already had a separate issue--

[Perkolator]

Forgot one thing. There doesn't seem to be any "notify of new runners / DLL components" feature/setting? Would be cool to be notified.

[Qronikarz]

@Perkolator

There doesn't seem to be any "notify of new runners / DLL components" feature/setting?

Currently no, but DLL Components and Runners tabs are supposedly up to revisit (https://github.com/bottlesdevs/Bottles/issues/2638) and it there is a feature request for update notifications - https://github.com/bottlesdevs/Bottles/issues/333