Currently back in Linux land (arch btw) as my daily driver, and I felt like getting some writing going. I use Scrivener for my longer things (albeit I have long considered switching to something else but the options are endless & all have shortcomings). Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a Linux port. As such, WINE to the rescue. But considering I have a bunch of Windows games already on this machine, maybe I could use one of those tools to get Scrivener running.

And oh my, did ‘Lutris’ deliver. For my experience, it was like 5 steps:

1. Download the latest Scrivener EXE
2. Install it using ‘Lutris’ (the + in the top-left of the window)
3. Configure it to point to the executable: lutrisScrivenerDir/drive_c/Program Files/Scrivener3/Scrivener.exe
4. Delete the textToSpeech directory in lutrisScrivenerDir/drive_c/Program Files/Scrivener3
5. Run Scrivener

The weird step here is deleting the textToSpeech directory but that tip came from this forum post.

The next steps are going to be harder, or so I thought. I store my Scrivener files on my Dropbox. I already use Maestral to have fully-functional Dropbox on my Linux machine and have my .scrivxs stored there. Turns out, the file-picker in WINEd-Scrivener actually exposes root so, all I really had to do was point where I wanted and done.

Now I can actually use Scrivener on all my machines mainly thanks to Lutris doing all the heavy lifting.

(I’m aware that this isn’t really a ‘dev’ thing but I thought maybe it could help some others)