My partner doesn’t do much on the computer except web browsing and writing. The Scrivener writing program had a Linux version at some point that was abandoned.
I wanted to see if anyone personally has used Scrivener with Wine and if it is fussy or not. How has your experience been?
I could set it up for them, but they’re not a tech person and will probably reject Linux if it breaks all the time and they have to get me to come fix it.
Extra irrelevant info: trying to decide on having them try Mint or Ubuntu. Fedora is my daily driver and I typically use a headless Debian install for servers, but I heard Mint and Ubuntu are pretty perfect and low fuss for Windows users.
Have you gotten them to try an alternative program? And if they REALLY need scrivener in particular, then you can try installing it in something called “bottles”, though it will probably require a bit of setup to work correctly, though my personal advice to anyone who needs a windows only program that doesn’t have a Linux port or alternative is to just… Use windows.
It’s been a few years but Scrivener used to be almost perfect under wine. According to the AppDB it still looks like a good chance of being a pleasant experience.
It looks like it runs in wine. https://www.reddit.com/r/scrivener/comments/102pvtk/scrivener_on_linux_abandoned/
Mint is easiest for old windows users.
Just let them do what they want to do. They can live their life the way they choose.
No, I’m putting a gun to their head and they will use Linux. /s
I have gotten a few comments like these, not sure why some of you are getting the idea that this is a forced switch lol
It has a pretty solid rating with cross over office. The problem with anything running in wine and interacting with the file system is that you see a meta file system that’s different than your normal desktop system. It can be confusing for non-power users.
It works decently. I use it.
A lot of input in the comments, I’ll just add mine in the mix.
I guess wanting to change the OS for someone can be good if:- the current Windows version is EOL and/or has security issues/concerns,
- the hardware is too old to upgrade,
- the current user is fed up with crashes, popups, slowliness etc…
Now, I would go for Mint anyday instead of Ubuntu, because the default matte desktop feels more confortable when coming from windows.
As for Scrivener, I don’t even know what it is, but Wine is quite good recently, so if you’re tech/linux savy, you could try to make it work.
Cant say for sure about Scrivener, but Bibisco has a native Linux version and it runs great on my MX 21.3 laptop. Working to convert my GF too, as we both write a lot and her laptop (same model as mine)gets hot for no reason with Win 10, not to mention its Windows…
I’ll try dropping scrivener into Bottles as a test and report back, but I think a native app is a must for a full time writer.
EDIT: Scrivener doesn’t just install in Bottles/Wine from what I can see. It failed for me, and I’m working on the dependencies, but as another commenter pointed out, the meta filesystem would likely be a deal-breaker for most on-tech-savvy users who need easy access to their files to share them.
You can still use the old Scrivener for free, it’s been floating around as an appimage: https://www.appimagehub.com/p/1262832/
I’m afraid I only own the modern Scrivener through the App Store, so I wouldn’t be able to install it on my linux machine to test it #-;#
I don’t think you’ll find many people here who have used this particular software. I hadn’t even heard of it until I read this post. Why not just try to get it to run on your machine? If you’re scared of messing up something, just put it in a VM.
Edit: oh and try Bottles. That’s a pretty easy way to get Windows stuff to run on Linux.
It’s a pretty popular writing software, though you mainly hear about it in writing circles so that might be why you never heard of it.
Why not just try to get it to run on your machine?
I wanted to gauge the level of effort involved first. I easily can sink hours into tinkering something and getting it to eventually work but sometimes it isn’t worth it.
Usually rated “Gold” or “Platinum” on AppDB:
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=12274
Platinum: “Applications which install and run flawlessly on an out-of-the-box Wine installation”
Gold: “Applications that work flawlessly with some special configuration”Click on a version. Apparently it works perfectly, but you need to
winetrickscorefont,vcrun6,speechsdk, andsapifor the initial install.Go with LMDE5. It will run faster the Windows has never ran on that hardware.
Honestly, I’ve found that for non tech-savvy people making any sort of major change results in confusion and frustration. Unless there’s a reason that you’re wanting them to switch at this particular point in time, and unless the impetus for the change is coming from them…just leave it, don’t mess with a setup they’re comfortable with.
On the distros: Go with mint. ubuntu has snaps which are the perfect way to scare new users away. They make everything super slow to launch and cause errors that make no sense if you don’t know how snaps work.
And worst of all, if you type “sudo apt install firefox”, hit enter and press Y, you won’t get what you asked for. You’ll get the snap version of firefox and the only way to know that is if you read and understand the output of apt.
@nottheengineer is this also the case with Ubuntu server? If so is there a way to turn that shit off,
They are definitely pushing it there too, but not as hard. There isn’t a way to disable this shitty behaviour, you need to manually set apt up to not pull snaps for every package individually.
@nottheengineer well thanks for letting me know anyway, this probably explains a lot of the docker issues I have been encountering which are “snap only” problems, despite me installing through apt
Oh yeah, I learned about snap the hard way with docker as well.
I’d highly recommend using a different distro for that.
@nottheengineer what do you suggest? problem is I’m limited since my home server is a raspberry pi so I’m limited to distros that support arm
I should probably give Debian a try, but I never had a good experience with Debian desktop.
I’d say debian is a good pick. I have debian LTS on my ventoy for whenever I need to partition a drive and it’s been great.
I never had any issues with it, what drove you away from debian on the desktop?
You do realize non tech people have absolutely no idea about package formats and such?? If you don’t understand something you should probably not worry about it
That’s exactly my point. They shouldn’t have to worry about it and if you pick a distro without snaps, they don’t have to.
Well non tech literate people probably wont notice the start up time and they shouldn’t be using the terminal
Normal users do care about whether their browser takes 1 or 5 seconds to start up. That’s the difference between a new device and one from 3 years ago.
And for those that aren’t comfortable with the terminal, snaps are an even bigger issue. All their apps will be slow and glitchy and they won’t have any idea why.
I doubt it. Shooing the cat away take more time then that. Looking a the headlines on the tv takes longer. I can’t picture any member of my family actually noticing.
As for snaps . shrug sure if any app is glitchy all they know is check for updates, hopefully they do.
I can’t speak to running Scrivener, but other folks have that covered, so I thought I’d weigh in on your “extra irrelevant info.”
If it were me, I’d just give them Fedora. I set up my partner’s computer with it and they were fine. They adapted to Gnome like it was nothing, and everything went smoothly.
If you’re worried about the UI, you could use some Gnome Extensions to set it up like Windows (dash to dock, Arc Menu, etc.) or set up a KDE, Cinnamon, or XFCE spin to work like Windows.
Mint is an okay choice for beginners, true, but if you’re setting it up for them and will be their tech guru, any significant advantage is kinda lost. You’re the one who’s going to set up the starting packages and the DE and all that, which nowadays is about 90% of the advantage Mint has over Fedora when it comes to beginners. Because of that, since you’re tech support, you should just set up what you’re most comfortable running support for.
That’s just my opinion, though.
