Decanter

Decanter is a modern Wine prefix manager written in Haskell, utilizing GTK4 and Libadwaita to provide a native Linux experience.

⚠️ Experimental Project This project is a proof-of-concept created to test the coding capabilities of Gemini V3 (AI). The code, structure, and logic were largely generated as part of this experiment.

Analyze the Process: If you look at the Git commit history, you will find the original German prompts and AI responses in the commit messages. This history serves as a transparent documentation of the development workflow. It allows you to trace exactly:

• Where the AI produced flawless, working code immediately.
• Where manual intervention was necessary to fix bugs, resolve compiler errors, or adjust the logic.

💡 Inspiration

Decanter is heavily inspired by the excellent Bottles project. It aims to replicate the core concept of easy-to-manage "bottles" (isolated Wine environments) using a purely functional programming approach with Haskell.

🚀 Features

Decanter provides a clean GUI to manage your Windows applications on Linux:

• Isolated Environments: Create and manage multiple Wine prefixes ("Bottles") to keep dependencies separate.
• Architecture Support: Choose between 32-bit (win32) and 64-bit (win64) architectures when creating a bottle.
• Modern UI: Built with GTK4 and Libadwaita for a seamless GNOME integration.
• Smart Storage (BTRFS): Automatically attempts to create bottles as BTRFS subvolumes for better storage management. It gracefully falls back to standard directories if BTRFS is unavailable.
• Snapshots (BTRFS): Using BTRFS-subvolume snapshots the state of a battle can be stored and restored fast.
• Program Detection: Automatically scans the bottle's Start Menu to find and list installed applications.
• Drag & Drop: Simply drag .exe or .msi files into the bottle view to run or install them.
• Integrated Tools: Quick access to essential Wine utilities:
  • winecfg
  • regedit
  • uninstaller
  • wineserver -k (Kill all processes)
  • winetricks (if installed)

🛠 Tech Stack

• Language: Haskell
• UI Toolkit: GTK4 + Libadwaita (via haskell-gi)
• Build System: Cabal
• Dependencies: typed-process, directory, btrfs, text

Build with Nix

Decanter provides a reproducible development environment and build process using Nix Flakes. This is the easiest way to run or develop Decanter without manually installing dependencies like GHC, GTK4, or Wine.

Run immediately

To run Decanter without installing it (download, build, and run in one go):

nix run

Install in user profile

To install Decanter in your user profile:

nix profile add .

In order to remove it afterwards:

nix profile remove Decanter

Development Environment

To start a shell with all dependencies (GHC, Language Server, libraries) pre-configured:

nix develop
cabal run

Direnv

This project supports direnv to automatically load the development environment. Since an .envrc file is already included, you can simply run:

direnv allow

Now, whenever you enter the project directory, the Nix environment will be loaded automatically.

📦 Prerequisites (Building without Nix)

To build and run Decanter, you need the following system dependencies:

1. GHC & Cabal: (Haskell compiler and package manager)
2. Wine: Must be installed on your system.
3. GTK4 & Libadwaita Development Headers:
   • Debian/Ubuntu: libgtk-4-dev libadwaita-1-dev
   • Fedora: gtk4-devel libadwaita-devel
   • Arch: gtk4 libadwaita

Note: GTK 4.20 or newer is needed, because the return type of Gtk.fileDialogOpenFinish has changed.

🔨 Build & Run (Cabal)

Clone the repository and use Cabal to run the project:

# Update package list
cabal update

# Build the project
cabal build

# Run the application
cabal run decanter

📂 Data Location

Decanter stores its bottles in the standard XDG Data directory:

• ~/.local/share/Decanter/

📄 License

This project is licensed under the GPL-3.0.