Linux

Right now, what little money I can spare goes to World Central Kitchen. Money is just too tight these days. I’d consider contributing to the project, but only if the repositories were moved somewhere other than Github/Microsoft.

When people complain about software being monetized and closed instead of everything being FOSS and I say people want to put food on their tables... This is exactly why. Most of the projects that have a good deal of recurring donations are some form of productivity software. Companies or freelancers use them to make money on a daily basis and decide to give back a bit, to ensure that their software continues being developed (large corporate donors sometimes also get a say in what features are prioritized).

Nobody sets up a recurring donation for a neat bit of software that makes life easier, but isn't making the user any money.

It's GPL, just like the Fediverse prefers it. Single most recommended launcher in the Linux gaming community in recent years. And the owner makes €100 a month off it. AND there are people in this very thread saying people shouldn't donate to it because you could instead fund Wine development by buying a Crossover license (yay, proprietary software). Then another unrelated comment pointing out you can donate directly to Wine too. Then another comment saying they don't like how FOSS projects often don't disclose where the money's going.

Well guess what, open source devs want money so they'd no longer be dependent on their soul-sucking corporate day jobs and have more time to develop neat open source software. Open source devs are often overworked and some receive a lot of abuse for not spending more time on their open source projects. Orchestrated abuse for not spending enough time on his open source project is how the author of xz was pressured to give maintainer status to what turned out to be a nation state level actor trying to integrate a backdoor into everyone's Linux systems.

The open source community is abusive towards open source maintainers, really. I'm honestly glad I only have some small contributions to my name, and no large projects to maintain.

To be clear: No, I'm not any better when it comes to donations. I'm more likely to pay for proprietary software than to donate to an open source project I use. Same goes for most people I reckon. That's why, while open source is awesome, actually being an open source dev sucks.

I am slowly starting to spend more time in the FOSS world again and will soon move my main system to Linux (also again after a long break with Linux only being on spare laptops).

I want to put money into it and now can afford to. In this particular case I honestly never used the tool. Bazzite came with Lutris and it blew me away. Can anyone point to a good comparison between the two?

If I had money to spend on FOSS projects, this is definitely one of the ones I'd support. I likely will from next month onwards.

Why are the sponsors not enough? How big is the overhead on this project if multiple companies can't keep it afloat?

I just don't really know how to use it...

Probably better to buy Crossover and thus fund the people actually developing Wine instead of some project blowjng $100 on server costs for a Wine wrapper.

I installed Bottles once. It didnt work a single bit.

also, There is already a way to seperate wine apps. Its called wine prefixes, autogenerated with just about every wine frontend.

I wish we had some sort of libre "package" platform to donate to.

I'd drop $10 a month to support the myriad of libre software I use, but they're so many I can't hunt down how, and I'll end up forgetting to support some invisible package that's actually super important.

I'm having no problems with donating to OSS projects, yet what always prevents me from doing so is when such projects are not transparent where my donation money actually goes.

Yet, the average donations we receive are around 100 euros per month. A sum that doesn’t even cover server costs or the resources we use.

Well, I see no linked explanation where this money goes or why the server costs are so high, which is immediately a red flag for me.

I never even heard of Bottles, but it seems to me that free/opensource software gets into trouble like this when it tries to go bigtime by hiring a fulltime paid staff. If everything remained a side project that grew at the pace of however much time people had available to devote to it, wouldn't it avoid overwhelming server costs and having to beg for money?

https://www.winehq.org/donate

I don't know how much of the 3 million installs I represent but I installed it, found the whole process to create a bottle an unnecessary hurdle and didn't see any functional benefits over the five or so alternatives that also aim to make Windows software compatible with Linux. The Gnome headerbar UI also is alien on both game and desktop modes of SteamOS.

So I uninstalled it.

I mean...it's not very good though. I've used it a handful of times and decided it wasn't needed. I can just use Lutris or Steam or just straight up Wine itself and they all work better than Bottles.

• Last time I checked, Github required a credit card for its paid stuff.
• PayPal is a privacy nightmare. LiberaPay does accept the usual SEPA wire transfers and debit collects, but only if the recipient accepts them, too.
• Patreon only accepts credit cards or PayPal.
• Crypto… is crypto
• Polar only accepts credit cards and whatever the hell „Cash App Pay” is.

I have access to none of these options, except SEPA iff Bottles accepts it.

I have a feeling that fundraisers would get a lot more funding if they weren’t so US-centric. I’m German. I don’t need a goddamn credit card. I have money. And I don’t want some private company snooping through my accounts.

How expensive are the server costs? The website can be hosted from Github Pages since it's all static and the forums feature are also on Github aswell. For installing Bottles, I'm pretty sure that is handled by flathub.org

I had trouble with Bottles but Lutris just works

Original Source: https://usebottles.com/posts/2025-07-06-bottles-need-help/