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Trying to get my partner to switch from Windows to Linux. Has anyone tried Scrivener with Wine?

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.

thedarkfly ,

I haven’t tried Scrinever. What follows is about trying to convert people to Linux, you can safely ignore the comment if you’re not interested.

If the will doesn’t come from him, he will certainly look for things he doesn’t like and that will confort him in staying on Windows.

I’d say keep him informed and let him make his decisions with the information he has.

Catasaur OP ,
@Catasaur@lemmy.catasaur.xyz avatar

That’s a good and sadly realistic point.

I read a forum post back in the day about a guy that forced his wife and kids to use FreeBSD and they hated it. It was pretty funny but I also don’t want to be that guy

fartsparkles ,

Exactly. No one wants their autonomy removed regardless of whether it’s arguably in their interest or not. It sucks the joy out of it.

n00b001 ,

I mean, it’s just consent

If someone has the knowledge and examples that OP does, I’m sure they may come to the same conclusion

But jumping to the end without taking the other party on the journey results in forcing someone to do something that they might not want, or be ready for

skilltheamps ,

In my experience, not pushing it makes them want to try it themselves at some point. I guess you need to take care of their computer frequently enough, and are probably annoyed by Windows shitting its pants every time again. Don’t make any drama out of it, just point out how ridiculous it is that Microsoft cannot manage to build something that allows running two simple programs without breaking or nagging the user so often. They know that you use something else with which you’re happy with, and at some point they will become curious and ask wheter they can have it too. At that point do not promise much, say that it works a lot better but is also a lot different and sometimes a bit quirky. Do not rush it now, let them simmer in their curiousity. At a fitting occasion tell them very briefly about foss and how it is not a closed thing pushed by a corporation onto individuals to funnel data. When they ask if they can try it, tell them they can but it takes a bit of getting used to. Buy a new SSD, and safely store the previous storage in a anti static bag, exclaiming that everything is on there and cannot get lost due to linux. Set everything up with a dead easy DE, give clear tour of how stuff works. With this tactic, they want to get it to work by themselves, and are prepared to learn that some things work differently. It becomes an adventure that is totally revertable if it doesn’t work out. In contrast to when you want to force the change and they use everything as a reason to be unhappy about it.

socphoenix ,

My wife is basically tech illiterate and has 0 desire to ever use something that doesn’t just work out of the box. We’ve moved some of her software to foss (darktable over Lightroom due to their stupid subscription only model) but she’s really only comfortable on a MacBook and even then only after I’ve set the whole thing up and maintain software/os updates.

macOS also sucks for smb file shares so I have a FreeBSD jail that just does xrdp and ssh X-11 forwarding (better color matching for photos this way) and she runs a script disguised as a desktop shortcut to run her apps. The script launches an ssh session and pops up a simple program I wrote that just lists available apps like darkroom. Gives her native file speeds and 0 need to understand anything related to the OS. My rambling point here is unless you set it up so the SO doesn’t need to learn it’s likely to fail and in return you’ll be responsible for all of the maintenance. Unless you’re ok with that it’s probably not a good idea

Dotdev ,
@Dotdev@programming.dev avatar

It looks like it runs in wine. www.reddit.com/r/…/scrivener_on_linux_abandoned/

Mint is easiest for old windows users.

Lizardking27 ,

This is a joke, right? Like, this must be a satire making fun of stereotypical Linux users?

Catasaur OP ,
@Catasaur@lemmy.catasaur.xyz avatar

Nope

Lizardking27 ,

Dude I was giving you an out. You could’ve been all “haha just kidding” and saved some face.

You shouldn’t try to force someone into liking something just because you like it. That’s not okay. Especially when they’ve politely and repeatedly expressed disinterest. If all they do is web browsing and writing then why would they even need Linux?

Catasaur OP ,
@Catasaur@lemmy.catasaur.xyz avatar

?

You are reading into this post a bit too deeply and inferring a lot of things from my post that I never said. I am not forcing my partner into this and they have not expressed disinterest.

Diplomjodler ,

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.

Nyla_Smokeyface ,

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.

Catasaur OP ,
@Catasaur@lemmy.catasaur.xyz avatar

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.

jennraeross ,

You can still use the old Scrivener for free, it’s been floating around as an appimage: 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 #^-^;#

art ,
@art@lemmy.world avatar

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.

nottheengineer ,

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.

joel_feila ,
@joel_feila@lemmy.world avatar

Well non tech literate people probably wont notice the start up time and they shouldn’t be using the terminal

nottheengineer ,

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.

joel_feila ,
@joel_feila@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Zatujit ,

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

nottheengineer ,

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.

alteropen ,

@nottheengineer is this also the case with Ubuntu server? If so is there a way to turn that shit off,

nottheengineer ,

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.

alteropen ,

@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

nottheengineer ,

Oh yeah, I learned about snap the hard way with docker as well.

I’d highly recommend using a different distro for that.

alteropen ,

@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.

nottheengineer ,

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?

huskypenguin ,

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.

joyofpeanuts ,

If he drops Windows for Linux, he might as well opt for a free writing software. I read that Manuskript has pretty much all the features of Scrivener and is somewhat similar so the learning curve should not be too steep.

Maybe best to set it up in a separate partition or PC for a trial.

See also : alternativeto.net/software/scrivener/?license=ope…

Catasaur OP ,
@Catasaur@lemmy.catasaur.xyz avatar

Awesome, thanks for this! Looks promising, I’ll check it out.

kemsat ,

Totally unhelpful, but I love Scrivener.

Lmaydev ,

I’ll likely get downvoted for this.

It doesn’t seem like there’s any advantage for them in switching to Linux.

It’ll just make their experience harder for no real gains for them.

astraeus ,
@astraeus@programming.dev avatar

I wonder how much functionality of Scrivener you could get in Obsidian. I found an article about someone setting their Obsidian vault up to run a workflow similar to Scrivener.

boatswain ,

Obsidian is my Scrivener replacement. It’s not the same, but it’s a great tool that actually gives me more of what I wanted from Scrivener.

Certainity45 ,

Go with LMDE5. It will run faster the Windows has never ran on that hardware.

s38b35M5 , (edited )
@s38b35M5@lemmy.world avatar

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.

flashgnash ,

Not sure there’s really much point in trying to push people to use Linux if they aren’t interested in computers.

Imagine if someone came up to you raving about switching to a new car brand that has a 5% higher top speed and 10% more fuel efficiency for your money but the handbrake is in on the roof, you change gears with buttons instead of a gear stick and you fill the tires with water instead of air

Most people don’t care about what software runs on their computer and just want the default because it works the same way everyone else’s does

Only way Linux gets into the mainstream is if consumer hardware with it preinstalled gets popular, the steam deck is a good start

WhyJiffie ,

It’s their partner. Maybe OP just wants to get rid of microsoft in their home network and the household, which is not an absurd thing I think.

flashgnash ,

I’m probably going to be unpopular for saying this but I think at some point you just have to settle. What practical difference does it actually make to your life if someone else has windows on your network

WhyJiffie ,

It has, I think.

A little different, but I hope you’ll see my point.
My family members use netflix on our smart TV. The netflix that says in it’s privacy policy that they’ll scan your network to know what devices you have.
I have never agreed to that outrageously unacceptable privacy policy, still, my devices are scanned by that garbage service, and by that they have insight on what devices I have, when am I around (at home), the network services that those devices run (any android app can run a network service in the background), and probably the OS along with it’s version that your device runs. These information can be quite telling about your personality, your life situation and other private matters.

flashgnash ,

And it sucks that companies are allowed to do things like that with their software but I would imagine you wouldn’t be very popular if you try to tell them they can’t use Netflix anymore

Could always put your machines on a different subnet to the smart TV?

Catasaur OP ,
@Catasaur@lemmy.catasaur.xyz avatar

Bingo!

They wanted to give it a try so win-win for both of us if they end up liking it.

authed ,

Thats not really true though… I installed linux on computer-illeterate people so that they would avoid viruses and they were happy with it…

flashgnash ,

I always worry with those kinds of installations that I’m going to become permanent tech support because Linux problems are far less universal

Also if they need to run Photoshop or full fat Office they’re kinda screwed

Decker108 ,

Libreoffice is essentially full fat Office at this point. If you need any , more than what it offers, you’re more likely than not a computer savvy person already. Photoshop is hard to fully replace though. I ran it in wine for a long time, still haven’t found a good alternative.

flashgnash ,

Photoshop runs in wine? Gave up on trying to run it on Linux long ago not that I have a license for it anymore anyway

There’s stuff like photopea but the web based ones kinda suck and are full of ads

Bene7rddso ,

Probably old versions from when you could still buy it instead of rent

Decker108 ,

Yes, I found a guide for getting Photoshop CS6 running in wine (PlayOnLinux wrapper). A recent update to something broke it for me, but it might still work for others.

Zatujit ,

Ok if they are browsing and reading emails BUT you are the administrator. But apparently s/he has a Windows only program s/he relies on… Using Wine will only increase the probability of the program crashing

0ddysseus ,

Preinstalled on consumer hardware like Chromebooks in every school or for some unfathomable reason some of the nursing homes I work with?

IanM32 ,

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.

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