Search

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.

Anime has slowly grown into a global phenomenon, but visual novels are far more niche. Many visual novels remain untouched by localization companies, and sometimes the localizations we do get are…lackluster.

Often, the best way to experience a visual novel is in the original language—Japanese. Whether you’re already interested in learning Japanese, or want to learn Japanese purely to play visual novels in their original language, both motivations are perfectly valid. Visual novels are a great way to learn Japanese, because you get exposure to both the written and spoken language.

---

I've written a guide on how you can learn Japanese by playing visual novels with the help of a friend who made some suggestions to improve it, and it's available on our wiki, wiki.comfysnug.space. As with all pages on our wiki, it's licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0, meaning you're free to share and re-post the content.

If you're interested in learning Japanese or have already begun, I hope you find this guide useful. It isn't meant to be a dedicated guide on learning Japanese, but there are some tools you might not know about that will make your life easier.

If you have any additions or corrections to offer for this guide, or are interested in working on our other pages, you can sign up for the wiki here.