Bottles app for running Windows apps / games on Linux gets NGI Zero Commons funding

By Liam Dawe - 6 Aug 2025 at 10:41 am UTC

The NLnet Foundation revealed more projects receiving funding from NGI Zero Commons, which includes the popular Bottles app for running Windows apps on Linux.

Not heard of the NGI Zero Commons Fund before? From the NLnet Foundation it's designed to help support free and open source software. They receive financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme and even the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI).

In the announcement from the Bottles team they note it will go towards work on Bottles Next, as they're rebuilding the software to improve all parts of it. Back in early July, the Bottles developers put out a call for more support, so it's nice to see it answered.

While a lot of people use software like Heroic and Lutris, Bottles is just another tool in the box that you can use to make running Windows software a little bit easier.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.

Tags: Apps, Misc, Open Source, Wine

10 Likes

About the author - Liam Dawe

I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. You can also follow my personal adventures on Bluesky.
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6 comments

dpanter 23 hours ago

Mega Supporter

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A fine list of projects, among them Kdenlive and KiCad to mention a few perhaps more well-known entries.

2 Likes

Vidrax 18 hours ago

Supporter

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For me, Bottles runs several apps for which I had originally kept a Windows 10 partition. It's great for non-gaming apps.

1 Likes

pageround 15 hours ago

Supporter

Sweet! Bring back the appimage! Its been a great tool, i've been running the flatpak version as its the only option.

0 Likes

fenglengshun 8 hours ago

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They do need it. It's been stuck in rewrite limbo for, what, more than a year now? It is still my favorite Wine runner (unless there's suddenly been a new Qt/electron ones that integrates better with KDE?) and we do still get updates and fixes. But they have big ambitions after their current state, and I think they need that funding.

I just hope they architect it in a way that is more conducive to KDE and non-Flatpak platform. There were a LOT of unnecessary conflicts that I feel happened because they are very deep in libadwaita ecosystem, mainly with AUR (I recall one was because they used a pre-release libadwaita once, and nowadays because of the sandbox? I don't keep up with it anymore).

1 Likes

WMan22 3 hours ago

Bottles is like the only WINE GUI app I've seen that has the one click "full backup" option which is why I ignore how much I hate how GNOME-centric apps look due to just having a feature I consider irreplaceable.

If a KDE themed app did exactly what bottles did, I'd switch to that. I wish Lutris had the full wine prefix backup feature bottles has. Which is apprently considered in issue #1451 on the github but the last post about it was in February.

...Man do I miss Gradience.

Last edited by WMan22 on 7 Aug 2025 at 7:49 am UTC

0 Likes

tmtvl 2 hours ago

IMO q4wine is still the goat. It's my favourite alternative to just using the CLI.

0 Likes

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