Scrivener is one of the core pieces of software that is vital to my writing practice. That makes making it work vital to making the transition from Mac to Linux. Sure, I write most of my shit on one of my two Freewrite devices but editing it? That’s all Scrivener and getting it to behave in Linux was tough at first. Especially since this guide didn’t seem to work for me. Maybe it’s because my distro is PikaOS?
Why did I think PikaOS might be the problem?
PikaOS, for those of you not initiated, is a gaming-focused distribution of Linux. Specifically, it is a fork of Debian Sid. Thing is, because it’s a gaming-focused distribution, it allowed me to auto-install a bunch of helpful things for gaming, including Steam and Proton and… Faugus. Which adds a GUI to a lot of the Wine related shit, so I couldn’t just run a command and make it work.
So, it’s not something wrong with PikaOS per se, it’s more a difference than if I installed and configured everything myself with a distro like Arch. Something that made the command line instructions not necessarily relevant to my particular situation.
So, how did I fix it?
Well, I had to use Faugus’ GUI to configure Winetools to ensure dotnet48 and corefonts were installed. Once I installed Scrivener and nuked the texttospeech folder (because that’s what usually fucks with Scrivener on Wine), I got it to launch. However, that started a new problem: namely, I need a separate license to run Scrivener on Linux. Okay, technically, it’s running Scrivener on Windows, but not really. And since I bought Scrivener so long ago, I don’t think I can find my license key for Scrivener 3, so I don’t think I can get the cross-platform discount on a Windows license.
That, and since I bought Scrivener 3 before I bought my current MacBook Pro and just moved Scrivener over via a Time Machine backup, I doubt I’d be able to crossgrade anyway. Still, I’m going to e-mail Literature & Latte to see if we can work something out.
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