Flatpak-Wine (wine-7.0) and (wine-5.0.5) and Flatpak-Proton GE 7.29 Stable

Official stable Wine 5.0.5 and 7.0 in flatpaks for all flatpak supported distributions (https://flatpak.org/setup/), along with WineZGUI (scripts) to manage bottles/wineprefixes. Winetricks is also included complementary :-)

Copyright: (C) GNU GPL3 Mohammed Asif Ali Rizvan (https://github.com/fastrizwaan)

!! Now using WineZGUI with flatpak-wine-5.0.5, fltpak-wine-7.0 and flatpak-proton-ge-7.29 !!

flatpak-wine 7.0 with WineZGUI [for latest stable experience]

flatpak-wine 5.0 with WineZGUI [for wine 5.0 compatible games]

flatpak-proton-ge-7.29 with WineZGUI [for proton compatible games]

flatpak-winezgui [stable wine from flathub]

For the impatient

In a terminal window, copy paste these:

#Install flathub repo and dependencies for flatpak-wine
flatpak --user remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak --user -y install flathub org.winehq.Wine/x86_64/stable-21.08

# Download flatpak-wine 5.0.5 and flatpak-wine 7.0 and flatpak-proton and flatpak-winezgui can be installed together

wget -c https://github.com/fastrizwaan/flatpak-wine/releases/download/0.84/flatpak-proton-ge-7.29_0.84_20220822.flatpak
wget -c https://github.com/fastrizwaan/flatpak-wine/releases/download/0.84/flatpak-wine5_0.84_20220822.flatpak
wget -c https://github.com/fastrizwaan/flatpak-wine/releases/download/0.84/flatpak-wine7_0.84_20220822.flatpak
wget -c https://github.com/fastrizwaan/flatpak-wine/releases/download/0.84/flatpak-winezgui_0.84_20220822.flatpak

flatpak --user install flatpak-proton-ge-7.29_0.84_20220822.flatpak
flatpak --user install flatpak-wine5_0.84_20220822.flatpak
flatpak --user install flatpak-wine7_0.84_20220822.flatpak
flatpak --user install flatpak-winezgui_0.84_20220822.flatpak

# Run
flatpak run io.github.fastrizwaan.flatpak-proton
flatpak run io.github.fastrizwaan.flatpak-wine5
flatpak run io.github.fastrizwaan.flatpak-wine7
flatpak run io.github.fastrizwaan.WineZGUI

Get Latest releases from flatpak-wine-release (7.x, 5.0.5) and flatpak-proton (ge 7.29 stable from flathub)

https://github.com/fastrizwaan/flatpak-wine/releases

What is flatpak wine?

Flatpak-wine is simply wine and winetricks bundled in a flatpak file.

It includes bash scripts (WineZGUI) for GUI prompts similar to winetricks.

The wine prefixes or bottles, are handled with bash scripts.

There are 2 wineprefixes/bottles:

default bottle (~/.var/app/io.github.fastrizwaan.flatpak-wine7/data/prefixes/default/)

Game bottle (~/.var/app/io.github.fastrizwaan.flatpak-wine7/data/prefixes/game/)

flatpak-wine has full host access. So if you want to restrict it, use flatseal app from flathub to limit the directories it can read/write. It is given full rw access on the host so that apps/games in different partitions or directories can be run without any issues. But everything is official, there are no patches, one can check the manifest and scripts.

Default bottle:

whatever exe we install/run using terminal flatpak run io.github.fastrizwaan.flatpak-wine7 or (open-with from file manager) or from menu goes to the wineprefix: ~/.var/app/io.github.fastrizwaan.flatpak-wine7/data/prefixes/default/ directory. This can be used to test/install softwares/games. The default bottle / wine prefix gets usually gets messed up by installing many apps/games or winetricks dlls. A "Delete..." option is provided to delete ~/.var/app/io.github.fastrizwaan.flatpak-wine7/data/prefixes/default/.

Game.exe / app.exe bottles:

It would be good if we create and use separate bottles for each of our games/apps. And for that we can create game or app specific bottle. To do that right-click on an .exe file in the file manager (nautilus / dolphin / thunar) and choose "Create Bottle using flatpak-wine" from right-click menu of filemanager. It will ask for a name, if no name is given, "filename.exe" is used in the menu.

The game/app bottle creates a wineprefix and a launch script for that game/app at ~/.var/app/io.github.fastrizwaan.flatpak-wine7/data/prefixes/ and creates a shortcut and icon from the exe file in the same Game/App directory which is symbolically linked (ln -s) to ~/.local/share/applications/io.github.fastrizwaan.flatpak-wine7/. This shortcut (desktop file and icon) will be deleted when we delete the game bottle.

Customizing Bottles:

Both default and app/game specific bottles provide some options to customize, like winetricks gui, winecfg etc. We can open flatpak sandbox shell from the options, and run winetricks, wine like we run from terminal window.

Customzing flatpak-wine or game bottle with winetricks:

Install your required dlls using winetricks

Commandline using terminal window:

We can use Open Terminal feature to access command line.

How to access this app/wine bottle

Just go to ~/.var/app/io.github.fastrizwaan.flatpak-wine7/data/prefixes/, and we can find all the games and default prefixes created by flatpak-wine7 here.

Why flatpak-wine when others (lutris, playonlinux, bottles, etc.) exist?

Lutris, Bottles, Phoenicis, PlayOnLinux, either does not work consistently and or have confusing frontend / interface. Flatpak-wine is trying to be simple, and work as expected i.e., running exe from filemanager, and creating bottles from exe is easier in flatpak-wine.

Why wine inside flatpak?

1. Upgrade breakage fix: When our distro updates wine, some games which work with specific version of wine will stop working. so, flatpak-wine is independent of distribution, so it will not break games with distribution upgrades of wine.
2. Consistent Version : wine within flatpak with a fixed version (5.0.x) works across all flatpak supported distributions (https://flatpak.org/setup/). And other version like flatpak-wine-6.19 can co-exist together for other games.
3. Availability across most Linux distros: Centos like distributions do not provide 32 bit wine in their repository. Or you can't have older version of wine like wine-2.17 for older games.
4. Consistent libraries: wine in different distro may not work because of missing libraries, e.g., debian needs to enable 32 bit support. The advantage is that the shared libraries in flatpak are consistent across all distributions. which can be used to run official wine build from winehq.
5. Works like wine bottle management apps like PlayOnLinux / Lutris for wine / Bottles app.
6. Straight forward and quick launching of Windows programs and games.

Why wine-7.0 or wine-5.0 stable why not wine-staging?

Wine staging breaks with updates. So it is better to use stable wine than latest but unreliable wine version.

Can we make a flatpak bundle of Game + wine?

Yes, for that see winepak-x86_64 (https://github.com/fastrizwaan/winepak-x86_64). The Drawback of winepak-x86_64 bundle is that creating bundle takes a lot of time 20 minutes to hours. and it is difficult to bundle all the runtime stuff for all the games. Some games and apps can be bundled easily with that. Bottles created with flatpak-wine is a simple solution.

But one can quickly setup flatpak-wine and use the game directory, why bother with creating a flatpak-bundle when the game or app would last a few days to a few months?

Usage (commandline):

flatpak run --command=wine io.github.fastrizwaan.flatpak-wine7 --version
wine-7.0

How to kill/stop stuck flatpak-wine game or application?

from the terminal window run flatpak kill io.github.fastrizwaan.flatpak-wine7 or from your desktop environment's menu winezgui->Kill...

How to build the same flatpak on my system?

It's simple: build takes up to 2 hours (50 minutes on i7 4th gen)

git clone https://github.com/fastrizwaan/flatpak-wine.git
cd flatpak-wine/io.github.fastrizwaan.flatpak-wine7
bash ./install.sh

this will create a flatpak and also install it (as --user)

Videos

https://youtu.be/x4PUObpG8sI (flatpak-wine version 1.0 install instructions) old version

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmHe6faMS8 (raji game)

https://youtu.be/7vTIGOXQYfw (kungfu strike with flatpak-wine)

https://youtu.be/IvZfBgg0Xy8 (New super lucky's tale)

https://youtu.be/VT22Ii4-Wwg (Friday Night Funkin)

https://youtu.be/vFWWEDc9OfM (Hob the game wine 5.0.5)