// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Bottles Brings Hope for Windows-only Software on ARM Devices
It's been a while since I last wrote about Bottles. For anyone new to it, Bottles runs Windows software on Linux by hiding most of Wine's configuration work behind a straightforward interface.
Its feature list has been growing consistently too. You can pull common Windows components like .NET and Visual C++ runtimes with a single click, or juggle multiple Wine and Proton runners per bottle.
Additionally, UMU support lets you run Proton games outside Steam, and snapshots give every experiment of yours a rollback point.
With its newest offering, Bottles pushes past x86_64 hardware. Bottles 67.4 is a test release aimed at ARM64 on Linux, which is delivered through an experimental cpak package.
And know that the ARM64 rollout actually spanned two releases. 67.3 added the first ARM64 build of the cpak package, and 67.4 followed hours later with a few misc fixes and Soda 11.0-10.
Placeholder images of Bottles 67.3 running on an x86_64 system.
On ARM64 systems, cpak now fetches the right build for the platform, while Soda, Bottles' Wine-based runner, carries native ARM64 and ARM64EC support. FEX also comes bundled for running x86 and x86_64 Windows software.
All of that makes Bottles genuinely useful on ARM64 Linux hardware, be it single-board computers or Arm-powered laptops.
What surprised me most was the speed at which this was delivered.
The request to add ARM64 (or AArch64) builds was opened a week ago. Within three days, there was a test candidate, the request poster (TCB13) confirmed Bottles launched on their own ARM64 hardware, and the issue was closed and marked as completed soon after.