[Guide] Playing Visual Novels on GNU/Linux
[Guide] Playing Visual Novels on GNU/Linux
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.comfysnug.space/post/138679
We've been working on a guide to help players on all major GNU/Linux distributions play visual novels for the past few weeks. This guide is designed to be used by both beginners and experts, with minimal need to touch the command line.
openSUSE wins the award for "never had to touch the terminal" and "simplest setup instructions", but Fedora is a close second.
While there are a few existing visual novel guides for GNU/Linux around, we've tried to fill in the gaps we noticed. We've put a lot of research into this guide and ensured it is accurate while remaining simple and approachable.
If you're interested, start here!
We have an extensive Troubleshooting section on our Problems page if you're having trouble getting visual novels to work, too.
I wrote this guide with a lot of help from two other people, including /u/[email protected]. It’s available on our community wiki, https://wiki.comfysnug.space. As with all pages on our wiki, it’s licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0, meaning you’re free to share, remix, and build on the content as long as you credit us.
We also have some other pages you may find useful:
- If you're looking for something to play, check out our Recommendations page.
- If you want to know where and how to buy a visual novel you want to play, our comprehensive Buying page will help you out.
- And if you want to read a visual novel in Japanese, our Reading in Japanese page offers a lot of advice and points you to some useful software to make the process easier.
you haven't been able to get bottles working for VNs? I'm willing to help out in this case, it's how I predominately played most of my VNs
I added a new section for a basic Bottles setup: https://wiki.comfysnug.space/doku.php?id=visualnovel:winedistros#using_bottles_as_a_wine_manager
There's still a lot I don't know, but there's definitely some cool stuff in Bottles and I'm glad I can finally use it, haha. Thanks for your help!
Unfortunately not! Admittedly, I only tried the Flatpak on Arch while I tested Lutris on all the distributions we provide instructions for. I got a bunch of different errors when trying to launch Sono Hanabira 1. I'm reinstalling Bottles with Flatpak now so I can test it again.
First, I create a Gaming bottle. I change the Runner to system Wine, which is Wine Staging 8.12 for me. Then I get the classic File Join error:
So, it seems like the filenames are garbled. I install
cjkfontsas a dependency—I wish it gave me feedback as to what it's doing like Lutris does in the installer while it does this because it takes a while, but that's a small usability thing. I also set theLANG=ja_JP.UTF-8environment variable in settings for the bottle. I try to launch it again and the text isn't garbled anymore, but I still get the filejoin error:
This is weird, because I'm pretty sure this is a result of a bug that existed from 2008-2022 fixed in Wine 7.10, and I'm using Wine 8.12.
At this point, I wonder if the locale is taking and run the commands listed in this comment: https://github.com/bottlesdevs/Bottles/issues/2129#issuecomment-1354415425
I try again, but I get the same error. At this point, I figure Sono Hana is probably a tricky game so I try H2O now, which I know works in normal Wine, Lutris, and even CrossOver, but I get this:
And I get a lot of similar issues for other VNs, too.
I'll see if I can give it a try later tonight, since there may have been a regression since I last played anything. do you have any specific VNs you had issues with aside from sonohana? I played through the rance series using bottles up to magnum quest.
I try again, but I get the same error. At this point, I figure Sono Hana is probably a tricky game so I try H2O now, which I know works in normal Wine, Lutris, and even CrossOver, but I get this: