Spectacle8011

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

I’ve only used CrossOver on Linux and actually find it harder to use than Lutris. There’s some crazy stuff like needing to declare environment variables inside a configuration file instead of having a GUI for it. But if you look at CodeWeavers’ blog and release notes, you’ll see them constantly making changes to improve gaming on macOS. That’s where they seem to be devoting most of their energy these days. CrossOver on Linux worked for Microsoft Office when I needed to use it, but that was the only reason I bought it.

I still think it was a worthwhile purchase, if only to support further Wine development. CodeWeavers has a great article about the differences between CrossOver and other Wine distributions: codeweavers.com/…/wine-crossover-and-proton-whats…

PlayOnLinux is no longer under active development (even Phoenics seems to have been stale for a while now), and Steam’s Proton, Lutris, or Bottles are what you should use on Linux nowadays.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

Is your issue that Lutris is buggy or limiting? I haven’t encountered buggy behavior in Lutris, and it gives you a ton of options. I like some parts of bottles but I would really like to be able to change cover art without editing a config file, lol. It’s definitely the easiest way to get started with Wine though.

There’s Heroic Games Launcher too, by the way. It has less features than Lutris but it’s probably easier to use? It’s also prettier than Lutris, I think. What issues were you having with Lutris?

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

macOS has made it difficult for both game developers and Wine developers to support the platform by letting their OpenGL support rot, removing 32-bit support, ignoring Vulkan and coming out with their own graphics API, Metal. Wine is in a worse state than on GNU/Linux. There aren’t many native games available for macOS.

That being said, your best bet is likely CrossOver. They employ the principle Wine developers, worked with Valve on Proton, and have put a lot of effort into supporting macOS. They’ve got a free trial with complete functionality you can try out.

But if the games you’re playing have native releases for macOS, that’s not something you need to worry about. There are just so few games available on macOS that I assumed they don’t. Now, I only have an Intel iMac which I never play games on so I couldn’t tell you how the newer ARM laptops perform.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

I was aware of the Game Porting Toolkit announcement. In fact, I first learned of it from CodeWeavers, who noticed Apple used their code to develop it.

We are ecstatic that Apple chose to use CrossOver’s source code as their emulation solution for the Game Porting Toolkit. We have decades of experience creating ports with Wine, and we are very pleased that Apple is recognizing that Wine is a fantastic solution for running Windows games on macOS. We did not work with Apple on this tool, but we would be delighted to work with any game developers who try out the Game Porting Toolkit and see the massive potential that Wine offers. Our PortJump™ team has perfected the art and science of creating ports of Windows applications using our Wine technology, and we welcome inquiries about how we can help get your game working on macOS.

I don’t play games on macOS, but my understanding was the same as yours; that it was a testing tool for developers to test out how the game might work on macOS. That’s how it was presented. I didn’t think it was meant to be used by macOS users.

In any case, CrossOver is intended to be used by macOS users (and the GPT uses the same code, as enthusiastically explained above), and it has a good graphical interface. I think these factors make it obvious to recommend CrossOver as the canonical solution for playing Windows games on macOS.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

When developers need to draw graphics on the screen, they use an API like Direct3D (or DirectX) or Vulkan to accomplish it. Direct3D only works on Windows. Vulkan works on many operating systems. Vulkan replaced OpenGL.

DXVK translates DirectX calls, which only work on Windows, to Vulkan calls, which will work on Linux and other operating systems. It’s so good at this that it’s better than commercial game engines like Unity. DXVK is a separate project from Wine. Wine also uses wined3d to convert older Direct 3D calls to OpenGL calls, for the same effect.

Lastly, there’s VKD3D, which is Wine’s own Direct3D12 ➜ Vulkan compatibility layer. Valve forked this and created VKD3D-Proton, which is specifically designed for games, as opposed to general software.

Yes, it’s a bit confusing.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

It’s a shame that Cory Doctorow of all people seems to have misinterpreted this. And that he is using Medium to deliver this story.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

This is how the BMW a friend owns works, and it’s not an EV. The unlock button in the driver’s seat just stops working if the car is off.

How do I know this? I decided to stay in the car while my friend went to go get something, and it auto-locked as he walked away. After about 5 minutes of trying everything I could think of to get out (including attempting to climb into the boot, which was too small for anything except a malnourished child to fit through), he came back and unlocked it.

There is no manual way to unlock the door from the inside. I checked the driver’s manual. It says it’s impossible to do without “special knowledge” and does not provide any pointers on how to do so. The friend asked a guy at the BMW place after a service how to unlock it from the inside, and he said “oh, yeah, there’s no way to do that,” and laughed it off.

Previous BMW models weren’t designed like this. I can’t imagine what they’ll do to the next generation…

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

330i

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

BMW thinks so too!

BMW Handbook

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

The previous generation BMW car my friend owned worked fine. This is a new regression, and if you look further up the thread, you’ll see I’ve posted a photo of page 86 of the BMW handbook where BMW acknowledges their own bad design and pushes the responsibility onto the owner to not lock people inside the car. While also having an auto-lock feature which is on by default.

It would be good to find out if this design was intentional or somehow just not tested until they had produced these models. The wording makes it seem that way.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

I’m assuming uralsolo is talking about free software as in, software which gives users the four freedoms.

I don’t think all software needs to be free, but in some ways, it’s no longer the issue of the day. In this day and age, a lot of what we’re using is no longer really software. We’re using services with client-side Javascript which is nominally free software (but not really). Most of the actual software is sitting behind a server. I see this as good and bad. It means users of less popular operating systems get access to the same services as users of popular operating systems so long as they have browsers, and the negatives are, well…I’m sure you don’t need my help to think of some.

It’s hard to make money with free software because everyone has the right to commercially exploit it. For this reason alone, I don’t think it’s necessary for all software to be free, but I’ll be there to celebrate the programs that are free.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

Linus Torvalds, the Finnish engineer who in 1991 created the now ubiquitous Unix alternative Linux, didn’t buy into this dogma. Torvalds and others, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates, believed that the culture of open exchange among engineers could coexist with commerce, and that more-restrictive licenses could forge a path toward both financial sustainability and protections for software creators and users.

It’s kind of amazing that this article gets one thing right that most journalists don’t, which is that pushover licenses are more restrictive toward the software’s users than copyleft licenses, while simultaneously ignoring the fact that free software can be sold and the GNU Project actively encourages doing business with free software. However, I worry that by “more restrictive”, this article isn’t talking about passing on freedoms but instead talking about source-available licenses. I think this because it includes Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds in the same class, the former who was the CEO of a company that started the Shared Source Initiative, which was a source-available licensing program for Windows. Meanwhile, Linus Torvalds is a veteran of free software.

A little confusing, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt here. They’ve got the history right for the most part.

As the tech industry grew around private companies like Sun Microsystems, IBM, Microsoft, and Apple in the late ’90s and early ’00s, new open-source projects sprang up, and established ones grew roots. Apache emerged as an open-source web server in 1995. Red Hat, a company offering enterprise companies support for open-source software like Linux, went public in 1999. GitHub, a platform originally created to support version control for open-source projects, launched in 2008, the same year that Google released Android, the first open-source phone operating system.

I don’t understand why Github is being included in this list of “open source projects”. Github isn’t free software! It’s as proprietary as it gets. Gitlab, Gitea, or Sourcehut make more sense as they are actually free software projects. It’s a strange fact of life that the largest free software code forge is proprietary. I also think it does Apple a disservice by not mentioning the fact that Apple completely rebuilt its operating system on a free software BSD foundation in the late '90s, and then released parts of it as free software, like the XNU kernel, as well as CUPS, which I use today! Even as far back as the '90s, large private corporations like Apple were releasing both proprietary software and free software. Sun Microsystems of course was a much bigger free software contributor at the time.

All in all, I’m kind of confused by this paragraph. Is it trying to juxtapose “private companies” and “open-source”? Well, private companies just so happen to be the biggest contributors to the largest free software project today; the Linux kernel. Is it trying to say that private companies suddenly started releasing free software because of ‘open-source’? Why list companies that have made big contributions to free software without listing those contributions, then?

This is made even more confusing when it talks about Amazon relying on the free software Java language developed by Sun, trying to make the point that private companies relied on a blend of proprietary and free software components. It confuses things a bit more by introducing patents when it starts off talking about copyright, which can also be registered for free software.

Others, including Kelsey Hightower, are more sanguine about corporate involvement. “If a company only ends up just sharing, and nothing more, I think that should be celebrated,” he says. “Then if for the next two years you allow your paid employees to work on it, maintaining the bugs and issues, but then down the road it’s no longer a priority and you choose to step back, I think we should thank [the company] for those years of contributions.”

I agree very much with this. Red Hat’s many contributions to the freedesktop project come to mind.

There’s no singular definition, either. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) was founded in 1998 to steward the meaning of the phrase, but not all modern open-source projects adhere to the 10 specific criteria OSI laid out, and other definitions appear across communities.

I find this very troubling. The OSI applied for a trademark on “Open Source” in 1999 and were not granted it. They wanted to trademark the term so no one could twist “Open Source” into something it wasn’t (there’s a quote earlier in the article referring to “openwashing”), meaning they foresaw this. The Open Source Definition is very specific and if we start applying the term “open source” to source-available projects (or whatever else, like Brave Search’s “open” API), it loses all its meaning, and Windows suddenly becomes an open source operating system.

Here’s the Open Source Definition: opensource.org/osd/

Read it, know it, use it appropriately. It looks a lot like the Free Software Definition.

GitHub helped lower the barrier to entry, drawing wider contribution and spreading best practices such as community codes of conduct. But its success has also given a single platform vast influence over communities dedicated to decentralized collaboration.

Yes. That’s pretty scary.

While this volunteer spirit aligns with the original vision of free software as a commerce-free exchange of ideas,

…No, it was never like that. Since this article judiciously references our shared history, let’s talk about how Richard Stallman funded the GNU Project. Richard Stallman originally made his living off selling GNU Emacs (free software) on tapes to programmers so he could employ developers to work on parts of the GNU Project. Free software isn’t about not making money. Linus Torvalds, in fact, is the guy that originally didn’t want to make money from software! He originally released Linux under a restrictive license that prevented anyone from making any money from Linux. The GNU Project celebrated the kernel when Linus released it under a free license that allowed commercial exploitation—specifically, the GNU General Public License (V2).

But allowing anyone to use, modify, and distribute AI models and technology could accelerate their misuse.

This isn’t new. The GNU Project has a page about why software must not restrict people from running it. The entire point of free software is that no one is at the mercy of the developers and their ethics. Personally, I don’t trust OpenAI to know what is good for me.

LLaMA 2, a new model released in July, is fully open to the public, but the company has not disclosed its training data as is typical in open-source projects—putting it somewhere in between open and closed by some definitions, but decidedly not open by OSI’s.

This demonstrates why the Open Source Definition is important and canonical.

---

Overall, I’d say this article actually rates better than most articles I’ve seen written about free software in terms of accuracy and history. It makes some good points about funding. The article also includes voices from very relevant people in the free software / open source space, which is good.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Well, so much for me having the right side of history 🙂

Thanks for the correction! I had a proper look at the CUPS page on Wikipedia and it’s as you say:

Michael Sweet, who owned Easy Software Products, started developing CUPS in 1997 and the first public betas appeared in 1999.[5][6] The original design of CUPS used the Line Printer Daemon protocol (LPD), but due to limitations in LPD and vendor incompatibilities, the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) was chosen instead. CUPS was initially called “The Common UNIX Printing System”. This name was shortened to just “CUPS” beginning with CUPS 1.4 due to legal concerns with the UNIX trademark.[7] CUPS was quickly adopted as the default printing system for most Linux distributions. In March 2002, Apple Inc. adopted CUPS as the printing system for Mac OS X 10.2.[8] In February 2007, Apple Inc. hired chief developer Michael Sweet and purchased the CUPS source code.[9] On December 20, 2019, Michael Sweet announced on his blog that he had left Apple.[10][11] In 2020, the OpenPrinting organization forked the project, with Michael Sweet continuing work on it.[12][13]

This is kind of counter to the point I was making, so thanks for bringing it up. Apple still released some of their software under a free license back then, but without CUPS, it’s nowhere near as significant. I guess it’s worth mentioning that Apple forked KHTML from KDE as Webkit and continues to develop and maintain that browser engine today. However, Safari is not free software. Webkit is free software because KHTML was released under the LGPL, which prevents derivative software from developing it under a proprietary license.

Although, Apple’s own contributions and “any further contributions” are available under the BSD 2-Clause license: webkit.org/licensing-webkit/

Which kind of contradicts what I’ve read on the Wikipedia page where it says certain parts of the browser are licensed under LGPL and others are licensed under the BSD license…

I have no idea how it ended up that way, but there’s this announcement: docs.webkit.org/Other/Licensing.html

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

I can understand Systemd being trademarked, but does the Linux Foundation own the trademark for Systemd…? Surely not. I’d think Red Hat before I thought Linux Foundation.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

I think a dedicated wiki makes more sense for what is, essentially, documentation.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

I tried Lutris and Bottles, but I didn’t give Heroic much of a shot. Personally, I think Bottles is the nicest one, though I’m still using Lutris. Although, for my use case (Japanese language visual novels), Lutris makes it easier to select Japanese Locale for specific games, and hopefully with the next release, it will let you choose Locale when installing games: github.com/lutris/lutris/issues/493

I think the Lutris Installer is generally less finicky than Heroic and Bottles as it automatically detects the game executable after installation. It isn’t always successful, but it usually is.

Does the Heroic Flatpak bundle a runtime similar to the Lutris Runtime? It seems to imply that it bundles Wine versions, but what about all the other usual dependencies, like DXVK, Faudio, etc.? There doesn’t seem to be much information on that.

I’ll share the one thing that made my life much easier: Gamescope. So many visual novels don’t fullscreen properly, and Gamescope is a great workaround for that. The upscaling stuff is nice too.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

As someone who recently worked on a Github wiki…it leaves much to be desired. The first being that I couldn’t actually push with git! I needed collaborator access for that. I also find Github’s markdown flavor to be limiting; you can do a lot more with a dedicated Wiki like MediaWiki. It was okay for viewing, though. And having the docs in an actual repository is much harder to navigate for users who aren’t developers.

So while it’s something you see a lot, I think they would be easier to collaborate on and view on a dedicated wiki.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

I learn something new every week about subjects I was decided on for a long time, forcing me to re-evaluate. It seems like there are more knowledgeable people here than on Reddit. I do wish our visualnovels community was more active, but alas, it’s a more niche subject that’s bound to grow slowly.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

Thanks for posting this! It was a long read, and while I was familiar with a lot of the history, I learned some new things.

As I’ve said before:

I would support Red Hat if they only made their free software offerings available to paying customers. I think this is how a free software company should work. Most free software is not sustainable today, and it would be nice if Red Hat could be a good example of how to build a successful free software company.

Even if Red Hat terminates the contracts of customers who share the sources, this wouldn’t be against the GPL, but I think it would be nasty to scare your customers into not exercising their granted freedoms under the GPL.

My position is that I don’t think this is how a free software company should behave, but I’ll refrain from voicing any further opinions until Red Hat actually terminates a customer’s contract for redistribution.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

Red Hat has decided to stop allocating resources for maintaining and improving these parts of the freedesktop project. Red Hat isn’t working on proprietary versions of them. They’ve just decided to stop paying for work to be done on them. It just so happens that many of these projects were only being maintained by Red Hat employees, it seems.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

Not Power Profiles Daemon…

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

Emersion put a lot of work into Gamescope for Sourcehut, too. It doesn’t have anything to do with this scenario, but I use Gamescope regularly enough to be grateful for it.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Pretty bad. My gaming laptop gets 2 hours on Arch and 4 on Windows. My work laptop gets 4 hours on Arch compared to 6 hours on Windows. My 2-in-1 laptop from 8 years ago gets about the same, if not more. My 2009 laptop gets like 8 hours, and probably more than Windows would.

Edit: I use auto-cpufreq, but this doesn’t help much. Power-profiles helps a little.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

My work laptop doesn’t have a discrete GPU; I bought it explicitly to get better battery life (I really like the gaming laptop for its 120Hz screen and other specs, but the battery life made it a no-go). It gets around 4-5 hours, which is good enough for me, but I’m sure it would get better battery life on Windows.

How did you get better battery life on the gaming laptop, if you don’t mind my asking? It uses a NVIDIA GPU.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

Some good pointers, thanks! I imagine it’s mostly the 120Hz display that’s killing my battery life…which is a shame, but alas, sacrifices need to be made sometimes. I’ll have to give these things a try!

Was it hard to find an AMD dGPU laptop? There are almost none where I’m based.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

all-AMD Asus Zephyrus G14

That was what I originally wanted! They were sold-out by the time I needed to buy one, so I went with an ASUS Scar something-something.

Most of the laptops I own are Dell laptops which originally came with Windows, on account of the 5-year repair deal where they repair it wherever you are (making use of IBM’s network to do so). I didn’t get a chance to see how the latest one worked with Windows 11 because I wiped it immediately…

I’ve heard good and bad things about Framework with Linux. I don’t know if I would end up buying it either way, as it seems like it would demand more experience than I have.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

I was buying a new laptop subsidized on 80% store credit, so I could only go for what they had in stock, unfortunately. I still haven’t had a single computer with an AMD GPU, but iGPU laptops give me a taste of what things could be like without NVIDIA…

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

Japanese visual novels, because there are more of them.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

GIMP is currently missing non-destructive editing (a rather core feature), but that’s something they’re aiming to fix in 3.2. I don’t know when that’ll be here, but that will be a good day for GIMP.

You might have better luck with Affinity Photo—it doesn’t really work well through Wine yet, but it’s getting there: forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/182758-…

I personally use Affinity Photo on macOS and I’m really happy with it. I like it more than Photoshop, actually. Fair warning that it will rasterize all your text layers in .PSD files, so you’d want to be using only .afphoto files, but it’s impressive how good the .PSD support is otherwise. So, give it a year or two, and Affinity Photo might be in good shape in Wine! I mean, I can hope.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

My very first thought. At the same time, it brought to mind stories of Richard Stallman’s “blank password” protest shenanigans…

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

As others have mentioned, many multiplayer games have anti-cheat, which is more likely not to work in Proton than it is. This area may continue to improve. See areweanticheatyet.com

Personally, I play a lot of Japanese visual novels, which usually aren’t released on Steam. Games encumbered with PlayDRM from DLsite will work in Wine, but all games from DMM are encumbered with DRM that doesn’t work in Wine. Wine is a compatibility layer for Windows games that makes them work on GNU/Linux, in case you weren’t aware.

On the other hand, many physical releases of visual novels aren’t encumbered with DRM, so they work fine in Wine. AlphaROM can be worked around by inputting your serial key into the SETTEC website. More information here: wiki.comfysnug.space/doku.php?id=visualnovel:prob…

Newer games might not be optimized for Linux in the first place

This is usually not true. There aren’t many native GNU/Linux games today; most of them are played using Proton, Steam’s compatibility layer for Windows games. There is no inherent penalty in translating Direct3D calls to Vulkan calls. Vulkan has the potential to be faster than Direct3D, actually. Native games may not be as optimized as the Windows counterpart, but as most of these are small indie games, performance is usually not an issue anyway.

And finally, let’s say I make the switch. What Linux distro should I use?

It’s a good idea to use a rolling release distribution. This is mostly to get the latest drivers; Steam and Lutris both ship a runtime with most of the dependencies you need to play games otherwise, though installing Wine on Ubuntu and Debian is harder, for example. Fedora and openSUSE are good choices. openSUSE in particular has robust graphical tools for package management and other activities which other distributions might force you to use the command line for.

I think a rolling release distribution is a good choice for a general desktop anyway. You’re running the latest software, which means the latest bug fixes and security fixes.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

I use Arch Linux, and there are occasional breakages. However, that’s the sort of thing you expect with Arch. openSUSE and Fedora, from my understanding, are far more rigorous about quality-checking and ensuring a good experience for users. Fedora is not a “true” rolling release distribution as it still has major versions, but openSUSE Tumbleweed is.

I personally don’t think the kind of stability these operating systems are offering makes sense for a desktop. For a server distribution, you absolutely want that kind of stability—mostly because it’s difficult to keep on top of upgrades while balancing downtime and your services requiring certain versions of dependencies. You can bridge the gap between newer releases of software with Flatpak and Snap on stable distributions, for the most part.

Fedora is probably a good compromise between completely rolling and stable. It’s particularly attractive to me for all of the security configurations they’ve made out of the box. One of these days, I’ll switch to Fedora or openSUSE…

I believe many developers have started testing and optimizing their games for Proton

I’ve always been curious as to what this process looks like. If they encounter a crash, unless they have a Wine developer on staff, it isn’t as if they can send a patch for Proton. And then there’s the period of time between Valve commissioning the fix and releasing a new version of Proton. All they can really do is open an issue with Valve, as far as I know. They can certainly make changes for the Steam Deck experience, though.

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

I tend to stick to mainline distributions (with the exception of Ubuntu), but I’m glad you’re having a good experience!

Spectacle8011 , 10 months ago

Thank you for sharing this! It was just the thing I needed to get a project setup. Toolbox couldn’t pull the version of Fedora I needed to use for whatever reason, but Distrobox works great and has a much wider selection of distributions.

Spectacle8011 , 11 months ago

For me, it’s:

• All software is shipped with as few changes as possible from upstream, so I’m getting the software as intended. If there’s an issue, it’s likely due to the software, not my distribution’s unicorn configuration.
• Pacman. This includes PKGBUILDs, syntax, and speed.
• Good support. For all that this distribution isn’t “the standard”, you find install instructions in places you wouldn’t expect, and more difficult things tend to work on Arch more easily than on other distributions.
• Easy to set new things up. Because Arch doesn’t ship with much configuration, there’s no existing configuration you need to investigate in order to wrangle it to work with something new. This is also a downside, but we’ll get to that…
• Inertia. I installed it a few years ago, and I kind of want to move to openSUSE or Fedora, but I’m too comfortable here.

Downsides:

• You need to configure everything. That includes the security stuff like AppArmor and SELinux you don’t understand.
• Occasional breakages. Arch doesn’t break that often, but it’s annoying when it does. Usually visiting bbs.archlinux.org is enough to set you on the right path.
• Some software is packaged more slowly than other rolling distributions. Notably, GNOME is usually packaged a few months after openSUSE and Fedora ship it.
• Constant updates! And HUGE updates, at that! Not great for computers you don’t use often. If you do, make sure to pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring before you install new updates.

Spectacle8011 , 11 months ago

Oh, cool! Since when? I always thought that was something the user shouldn’t need to remember and that Pacman should automatically prioritize it.

This is exactly why I love making these kinds of comments. Someone always comes along to teach me something new!

Spectacle8011 , 11 months ago

I use GNOME without any extensions, so there’s no benefit for me 🙃

I mean, technically I use AppIndicators, but I tend to just turn off system trays for all software I can. Steam is probably the only exception.

Spectacle8011 , 11 months ago

I also wonder about Nix and Guix. But I never seriously consider Gentoo.

Are those really important thing I should have configured? The only safety thing I have is LUKS encription.

Ubuntu configures AppArmor by default, Fedora sets up SELinux, openSUSE also sets up SELinux to some extent—most major distributions except Arch do it, because you’re installing it yourself. I recommend looking into it. AppArmor and SELinux are essentially about preventing privilege escalation. Here’s a good place to start: wiki.archlinux.org/title/Apparmor

SELinux is an absolute pain to understand and setup, so it’s good that Fedora does it.

Spectacle8011 , 11 months ago

I don’t see any need for them! I like the defaults. I only change the keyboard shortcuts, and I usually don’t even autostart anything. I tend to still install GNOME Tweaks so I can turn on Focus on Hover, move the Close button to the left side of the window, but I don’t need an extension for any of that. I don’t know what I would even use an extension for!

Spectacle8011 , 11 months ago

As long as the windows are being maximised into a workspace you can jump to with SUPER+[0-9], this seems interesting, if overly reliant on the mouse.

Spectacle8011 , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

What I like:

• I like GNOME 40 more than GNOME 3 because it’s prettier.
• I like GNOME in general because it’s stable with pretty, high quality bundled programs.
• I like the UX. It takes all the good things about the macOS UX and makes them better, while taking all the bad things and making them less stupid.
• I like that they completely separate the dock from normal window management, so I never hit it when my cursor reaches the edge of the screen.
• I like that you can set Nautilus to use one-click to open folders, even though that is cribbed from Dolphin. (Even if I use lf most of the time)
• I like the simple IBus integration that lets me setup my Japanese IME easily.

What I dislike:

• I dislike that I need a system tray extension for some software.
• I dislike how in-your-face the notifications are and that they can’t be stacked.
• I dislike that I need to use Dconf to set shortcuts for workspaces 5-10.
• I dislike needing GNOME Tweaks to set autostart software/daemons—this is a basic feature, not a “tweak”.
• I dislike not having an easy way to port my settings for GNOME to a new computer. It’s annoying to have to set all this stuff up again compared to Sway, where I clone a repository and copy some config files over.
• I dislike the new screenshot tool in GNOME 40+. It automatically saves photos to a directory, rather than letting me copy it. Come to think of it, I also dislike that it doesn’t support the same screenshot protocols Sway does for grim and slurp, which is my favorite screenshot workflow.

Spectacle8011 , 11 months ago

Oh! Super handy, thank you! I was just considering how I might use dconf to get this setup.

I haven’t tried it out yet but it seems like it would work well!

Spectacle8011 , 11 months ago

I’ll keep that in mind. The main thing is changing keyboard shortcuts—I like most of the defaults in GNOME. In theory, this should actually be easier to port over to new computers than Sway, because I only need to import one configuration dump.

I mean, I probably could have written a Makefile or something for my dotfiles repository but I’m lazy…

Spectacle8011 OP , 11 months ago

Ren’Py is a fantastic engine and it would be great to have more games developed in it. Unfortunately, a lot of visual novels don’t use Ren’Py, so they are only released for Windows and need to be run through Wine. This includes the vast majority of Japanese visual novels before 2010. The good news is that most of the time, this works pretty well—assuming you do it right. The setup isn’t complicated and hopefully this guide makes it easy to follow.

There’s a neat trick for running NScripter games natively on Linux, even if they were only developed for Windows: wiki.comfysnug.space/doku.php?id=visualnovel:vnso…

ONScripter is a drop-in replacement for the NScripter engine that works on Linux, and it can interpret NScripter game files just by running it in the same folder. This worked for me with TRianThology.

Steam games tend to work out of the box thanks to Valve, but this guide is for the visual novels that aren’t released on Steam (which there are a lot of).

Spectacle8011 OP , 11 months ago

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:

https://lemmy.comfysnug.space/pictrs/image/e49adcc9-68dc-43c1-b6d9-b679fed88308.png

So, it seems like the filenames are garbled. I install cjkfonts as 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 the LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8 environment 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:

https://lemmy.comfysnug.space/pictrs/image/03c9188a-50de-4a54-ad0d-eb122126f550.png

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: github.com/bottlesdevs/Bottles/issues/2129#issuec…

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:

https://lemmy.comfysnug.space/pictrs/image/4a236606-6f26-41a5-b599-9fdf652dab60.png

And I get a lot of similar issues for other VNs, too.

Spectacle8011 OP , 11 months ago

Here are some other VNs:

• I tried Dracu-Riot and don’t even get a window:

<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;">002c:err:wineboot:process_run_key Error running cmd L"C:\windows\system32\winemenubuilder.exe -r" (126).
</span>

• I tried Hatsuyuki Sakura and got an odd one complaining about not being able to find Startmenu.exe:

<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;">StartMenu.exeが見つかりませんでした。
</span>

• I tried Suteki na Kanojo no Tsukurikata, which gives me this:

<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;">00c4:err:module:import_dll Library UnityPlayer.dll (which is needed by L"Z:\run\user\1000\doc\2bcd2b83\Sutekina_kanojo_no_tsukurikata.exe") not found
</span><span style="color:#323232;">00c4:err:module:LdrInitializeThunk Importing dlls for L"Z:\run\user\1000\doc\2bcd2b83\Sutekina_kanojo_no_tsukurikata.exe" failed, status c0000135
</span>

• I tried Amrilato, which tells me it can’t find the game executable and gives me this:

<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;">002c:err:wineboot:process_run_key Error running cmd L"C:\windows\system32\winemenubuilder.exe -r" (126).
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Failed to launch. Arguments are:
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0 "Z:\run\user\1000\doc\4b6a94df\lib\windows-i686\TheExpressionAmrilato
</span><span style="color:#323232;">.exe"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">1 NULL
</span><span style="color:#323232;">2 NULL
</span><span style="color:#323232;">3 NULL
</span>

• I tried Higurashi Meakashi, which gives me this even though there is a data folder named this:

<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;">002c:err:wineboot:process_run_key Error running cmd L"C:\windows\system32\winemenubuilder.exe -r" (126).
</span><span style="color:#323232;">There should be 'HigurashiEp05_Data'
</span><span style="color:#323232;">folder next to the executable
</span>

And it continues on in this fashion. I’m using sys-wine-8.0, but switching to soda-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.

Spectacle8011 OP , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

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: docs.usebottles.com/flatpak/…/use-system-home

Spectacle8011 OP , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

I added a new section for a basic Bottles setup: wiki.comfysnug.space/doku.php?id=visualnovel:wine…

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!