Bottles 65.0 Shipped With 100+ Changes and 'Best Runner Ever' as Sole Maintainer Keeps the Lights On
The open-source Windows compatibility layer for Linux just got a massive feature dump, including D7VK support, frame generation, and a new security scanner called Eagle.
Mirko Brombin released Bottles 65 and if the commit count is any indication, he's been busy. The update brings over 100 changes across 70-plus commits — more than the previous two releases combined.
The tagline from the maintainer reads: "Bottles 65 is out with over 100 changes and Soda v11.0-4, the best runner Bottles has ever had!"
That's a bold claim, but the feature list backs it up. If you're running Windows games on Linux, there's now native D7VK support for translating Direct3D 12 to Vulkan. That's the equivalent of what DXVK does for older DirectX versions. There's also lsfg-vk frame generation, a built-in frame rate limiter, and groundwork for Intel's upcoming FSR4 upscaling technology.
Steam integration got a serious overhaul, too. Bottles can now discover your installed Steam games, identify Proton runners, and add them to your library without manual configuration. The dedicated sandbox feature, which isolates individual Wine prefixes — also received several improvements, including USB device passthrough for controllers and HIDRAW support for flight sticks.
Not bad for a single developer.
The Human Cost of 8,700 Stars
Bottles has 8,700 GitHub stars and 6,593 commits on main.And yet, this entire release, 100+ changes, 70 commits, the largest in the project's history, came from one person.
Brombin authored approximately 90% of the changes. Thirteen people contributed in total. Two of them made their first contributions with this release. One bot updated Weblate translations. Another bumped CI dependencies.
The previous major release (64.0) landed on May 29, 2026. A single bugfix patch (64.1) followed two days later. That means roughly six weeks of development produced more changes than the combined 64.0 and 64.1 releases.
It's a rather ambitious shipping pace for a project that depends heavily on a custom Wine fork called Soda. Version 11.0-4 is now the default runner, and the maintainer's call it the "best runner Bottles has ever had." The custom fork incorporates upstream Wine improvements plus Bottles-specific patches, giving the project tight control over compatibility at the cost of significant maintenance burden.
The Security Angle You Didn't Expect
Eagle is a new feature that adds community-driven compatibility data to the program catalog, but it's also doing something you might not expect from an open-source project: scanning executables for malware and stealer patterns.
If you're running untrusted .exe files through Wine, and let's be honest, that's a common use case, traditional antivirus doesn't apply. Eagle warns you before you run flagged programs. It's a practical solution to a real problem, even if it means trusting a community database of detection signatures.
There's also NTSync support detection, which identifies whether your installed runner uses the newer Wine synchronization backend that improves threading performance for CPU-bound games. NVK Vulkan driver detection made it in too, so the open-source NVIDIA driver gets proper recognition now.
What's Next?
The release announcement received modest engagement on GitHub with 8 reactions, mostly positive. Community Q&A continues on Discord, with questions about game saves after runner changes and Bubblejail sandbox issues suggesting a user base that ranges from beginners to advanced tinkerers.
Brombin's next move is unclear. The volume of changes in this release suggests a backlog that was cleared in one sweep, which could indicate either concentrated development effort or an underlying risk of regressions given the scope. There's no mention of an upcoming release schedule.
For now, the long wait is over. Bottles 65.0 is available via Flathub.
Head here to grab it.
