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Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, the issue is mainly that Bottles is still very much beta.

It really needs those frequent updates, which makes it a bad candidate for distro packaging. The correct decision, in my opinion, would have been to break it up into a stable GUI / configuration system and a daily updated "core engine", similar to how antivirus software updates its detection lists. Distros then package the stable parts and the core engine is updated on-demand.

But instead they insist on merging everything and all dependencies into one huge (and in my opinion very bloated) flatpak image which you, the user, then re-download for every tiny update. 10kb code change? re-download all dependencies and all assets!

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You may disagree with how they develop it, but I am very much a happy user of Bottles (other than how needlessly hard it is to search). It has made configuring wine and friends so much easier than before. Previously, I would just give up on about the second random forum post indicating this was the magic configuration required to run program X.

I will eat the disk space and heavy updates if it means I have an easier time of running windows applications.

>then re-download for every tiny update. 10kb code change? re-download all dependencies and all assets!

I have never experienced this with flatpak. The updates have always been very small unless they require a new platform version, but these platforms are shared between packages as well.

Having custom updaters in every package to fetch a new "core" sounds like the worst of all situations leading to something like windows where every time you open an app it prompts you to download the new version.

> The correct decision, in my opinion, would have been to break it up into a stable GUI / configuration system and a daily updated "core engine", similar to how antivirus software updates its detection lists.

The effort required to implement this in practice is pretty sizable, and antivirus software ships out signature updates at a much higher frequency than Bottles would be.

> 10kb code change? re-download all dependencies and all assets!

Any unchanged files are not redownloaded.

Distros then package the stable parts and the core engine is updated on-demand.

Would any distro allow this? AFAIK they don't allow distro packages to depend on outside stuff.

There are rolling distros, with weaker guarantees about whether anything still works from day to day. IMHO Bottles should fork one and make a distro, because they have strong opinions about ownership of update decisions.

I have no clue how you came to this conclusion when nothing in the article complains that distros aren't releasing new versions fast enough. Which exact part of TFA would stop being a problem if Bottles was released less frequently?

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