Bottles is a free, open-source tool that lets you run Windows software and games on Linux using isolated, sandboxed Wine environments.
Bottles is a free, open-source Linux application that gives users a graphical way to create and manage isolated Wine environments, referred to as bottles, for running Windows software and games. Rather than replacing Wine, Bottles wraps it in an approachable interface so users do not need to memorize Wine's configuration flags and environment variables to get a Windows application running.
The project became publicly known around 2020 and is maintained by the bottlesdevs organization, with contributors including Mirko Brombin, Francesco Masala, and Pietro Di Caprio. It is written in Python with the GTK toolkit and released under the GPL-3.0 open-source license, meaning the source code is freely available for anyone to inspect, use, or contribute to.
Each bottle created by the application acts as its own self-contained Windows-like environment, letting users run multiple, unrelated Windows programs on the same Linux machine without one program's dependencies conflicting with another's, a common problem when managing Wine manually.
Bottles automatically manages Wine runner versions and common Windows dependencies such as DirectX and .NET components, installing what a given application needs inside its own bottle without requiring the user to hunt down and configure these components manually.
Sandboxing is a central design principle: Bottles aims to confine each Windows application's access to the host system, which both keeps environments organized by use case and helps limit the potential damage from malware or misbehaving software running inside a bottle.
The developers strongly recommend installing Bottles through Flatpak, distributed via Flathub, because the Flatpak build is the only packaging method that delivers Bottles' full sandboxing capability; this makes Flatpak the officially preferred installation path over other Linux packaging formats.
Bottles is completely free to download and use, with no paid tiers, subscriptions, or premium features gated behind payment, consistent with its status as an open-source community project.
Because the source code is published under the GPL-3.0 license on GitHub, anyone is also free to inspect, modify, or redistribute the application, and there is no commercial entity charging for access to the core software.
The project accepts community contributions and, like many open-source desktop applications, may be supported through voluntary donations or sponsorships to its maintainers, but no functionality within Bottles itself requires payment.
Yes, Bottles is completely free and open-source software with no paid tiers.
A bottle is an isolated Wine environment created for running one or more Windows applications separately from other Windows software on the same Linux system.
The developers strongly recommend installing Bottles via Flatpak through Flathub, since it is the only method that provides full sandboxing capability.
No, Bottles uses Wine as its underlying compatibility layer; it adds a graphical interface and management features on top of Wine rather than replacing it.
Yes, Bottles is commonly used to run Windows games on Linux, particularly titles without native Linux support.
Bottles is released under the GPL-3.0 open-source license.
Bottles is maintained by the bottlesdevs organization, with core contributors including Mirko Brombin, Francesco Masala, and Pietro Di Caprio.
Bottles' sandboxing is designed to confine what a Windows application inside a bottle can access on the host system, which can help limit the impact of malware, though it is not a complete antivirus solution.