Bottles arrives on cpak

Bottles has always treated distribution as part of the product. A package needs to keep the application working, receive updates cleanly and give people a predictable place for their data. That is why Flatpak has been the official route for so long.

The cpak package is built and published by the Bottles project from the same release source. It is recognized by Bottles as an official package, including the package-specific storage and UMU integration required by the application. It does not ask Bottles to pretend it is a Flatpak or rewrite its desktop integration around a portal model.

Two official choices

At the time of this announcement, Flatpak remained the recommended and most tested package for Bottles. cpak gave early users an official alternative with OCI images and a package manifest that could be read before installation, but the cpak package was experimental while the runtime moved toward its stable release.

This matters beyond Bottles. A real desktop application is a better test than a demo. Wine, graphics drivers, launchers, updates and user data all have to work together. Bottles 66 is the first public release that lets cpak prove that work outside its own development environment.

Install Bottles with cpak

cpak install github.com/bottlesdevs/bottles

The package is available in the cpak Store with its manifest and permission choices visible. If you already use Bottles through Flatpak, there is no reason to move unless you want to test cpak. Experimental means bug reports are useful and a Flatpak installation should remain the fallback for work you cannot interrupt yet.