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/neo@lemmy.comfysnug.space. 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.
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.
Here are some other VNs:
And it continues on in this fashion. I'm using
sys-wine-8.0
, but switching tosoda-7.0-7
gives me identical results. It seems something is fundamentally broken in the install, but I don't see how that could be given I installed it via Flatpak.I do have dracuriot so I will be able to test that again then, by chance are you running the games from bottles internal system bottles' "Program files", I run all my games from that
Most of these games are installed in my
~/games/VNs
folder, but Higurashi is in a Wineprefix. These games were installed long ago, and some of them don't even have methods of installation. Since you gave me the idea, I installed Flatseal and gave Bottles free reign on "All user files (filesystem=home
)", which it didn't have, but that didn't help. I'm very much not an expert on Flatpak, so it's possible I missed something basic. Lutris on Linux Mint worked perfectly fine with Sono Hana 1, so I don't know what's different about Bottles.Edit: I copied Sono Hana 1 to
~/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles/data/bottles/bottles/runner-dir/drive_c/Program Files/その花びら1
and it worked! In the end, it was something basic. I think I'm going to break the sandbox though because I don't want to move all my games there: https://docs.usebottles.com/flatpak/expose-directories/use-system-home